Global research on leadership competencies: a bibliometric study with altmetric score

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate the global research on leadership competencies (LDC) from 2014 to 2023 in social science. Moreover, this work aims to assist researchers in identifying significant publications, prominent scholars and the relationships between these publications through citation and co-citation analysis. The comprehensive bibliometric analysis with altmetric score intends to provide a clear overview of the difference between article impact and attention. Design/methodology/approach A comprehensive literature review was conducted through Scopus. The data was collected from the Scopus database and analysed by the use of the bibliometric and altmetric indicators. The search string was “leadership competencies” among title, abstract and keywords. A total of 4,014 articles were collected from the field of social science, with the limitation of English language articles only. The analysis was performed using R (Biblioshiny), VosViewer, MS Excel and Science Open. Findings The findings reveal that there has been a significant increase in leadership research over the decade with significant contributions from the USA, Canada and the UK. It is found that the USA is the leading country with scholarly output and citation impact. According to the altmetric attention score, the research “Operationalising the definition of e-leadership: identifying the elements of e-leadership” by Van Wart M published in the year 2019 is at the top. Kogan JR is the most prolific author and the journal “Leadership in Health Services” is found to be the leading journal. Research limitations/implications The major limitation of this research is that it focuses exclusively on SCOPUS as a single database for the extraction of publication data from 2014 to 2023. The study highlights the continuous growth of knowledge in the area of LDC by analysing a bibliographic dataset. It identifies the key articles, authors, journals and trends of research keywords on LDC, which can practically help future researchers in finding the research gap. Overall, the study strengthens the connection between theoretical foundation and empirical findings with practical relevance, with a structured understanding of leadership competency research. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first bibliometric analysis on LDC in the context of social science with an altmetric score. This paper will give a new opportunity for researchers in metric studies.