Forty years of <i>Employee Relations</i> – <i>The International Journal</i> : a bibliometric overview

Purpose: This paper examines the leading trends for the journal Employee Relations from 1979 to 2018 upon its completion of 40 years of publication. Through conducting a bibliometric analysis, the article presents the journal's publication and citation structure, prominent themes, significant author keywords and leading articles, authors, institutions and countries since its formation. Design/methodology/approach: The article focuses on the journal's evolution and subsequent growth patterns during this period. Using the Scopus database, the leading trends in authorship, institutions, countries as well as cited documents along with the articles citing it were analysed to provide an analytic overview of the journal over the period of 1979–2018. The paper presents a graphical visualization of the bibliographic data with bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis using the visualization tools of similarity viewer software as well. Findings: The results indicate that the journal is on a progressive trend both in terms of productivity as well as the level of influence in the areas for which it is indexed. The journal receives the maximum influence from the UK, including its most productive authors and institutions. The journal has published research on prominent topics in human resource management, employee relations and the field of industrial relations. It has also published 25 special issues on recent trends in the domain of Human Resource (HR). Originality/value: This article offers the first comprehensive evaluation of the intellectual structure and research contributions of the journal over its lifespan. The findings of the article are useful for researchers and HR practitioners.