The Intersection of Social Work and Entrepreneurship: A Bibliometric Analysis (1925–2025)

This project is a bibliometric review of scholarly literature at the intersection of social work and entrepreneurship. Despite the growing relevance of entrepreneurship in social service practice—particularly in contexts of economic marginalization, community development, and income generation—the literature connecting these domains remains fragmented. This review aims to map existing research, identify trends, and surface conceptual and methodological gaps across a century of scholarship (1925–2025). The review will follow a transparent and replicable search protocol using SCOPUS and Web of Science, restricted to English-language, peer-reviewed journal articles. The search strategy combines social work–related terms (e.g., “social work,” “human service”) with entrepreneurship-related terms (e.g., “self-employment,” “economic empowerment,” “microenterprise”). Covidence will be used for screening and full-text review. Data extraction will include publication year, journal, methodology, geographic region, population focus, and thematic domain. Descriptive and network-level analyses (e.g., co-authorship, keyword co-occurrence, citation mapping) will be conducted using bibliometric tools such as VOSviewer or Bibliometrix (R). The project is registered prospectively to support methodological transparency, foster interdisciplinary collaboration, and contribute to evidence-informed approaches in social work research and practice.