A bibliometric study of social entrepreneurial intention: Trends, networks, and future directions

Social entrepreneurial intention plays a vital role in identifying, assessing, and analysing an individual's intention to engage in social entrepreneurship to address multifaceted social issues and fulfil social needs through social ventures. Therefore, this study aims to conduct a thematic evaluation of social entrepreneurial intention, the authors' networks and affiliations, future research directions, and the impact of journals on social entrepreneurial intention through bibliometric analysis. 245 Scopus bibliographic records were utilised, and Bibliometrics-bibliophagy was used to analyse them. These findings suggest a significant increase in research articles on social entrepreneurial intention from 2011 to 2025. Co-authorship, frequent keyword occurrence, co-citations, countries' collaboration, sources' impact, thematic clusters, and evaluation were measured. The thematic cluster involves social entrepreneurship, social capital, social entrepreneurial intention, social entrepreneurial education and perceived desirability. Future research directions suggest exploring social entrepreneurial education and university students' intentions to engage in social entrepreneurship. This research on the thematic growth of social entrepreneurship significantly contributes to the government, universities, nascent social entrepreneurship, non-profit organisations, academic practitioners, and social researchers in analysing students' and youth's current growth in social entrepreneurship intention and its impact on the creation of social ventures.