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counterpart of one's own overview of a discipline. In other words, the author co-citation analysis only allows one to have an overview of a given field based on its literature. An in-depth analysis of the research contents of the field is not available from the author co-citation analysis. Thirdly, the publication process is overwhelmed with time lags; author co-citation analysis shows the way a field looked some time ago, not necessarily how it looks today or will look tomorrow. Fourthly, there is a self-fulfilling process that goes on in a research field's development. Researchers “learn” that they should cite certain authors work, because it is heavily cited in previous work, or the omitted citation is quickly picked up by astute reviewers. Fifthly, the citation indexes have their own built in biases, they only include certain journals in their database, and those journals change somewhat over time. Thus, citations of some of the early work may not appear in the current SSCI database due to either the journal's demise or that the journal is no longer on the citation list. Finally, computational limits constrain this analysis to authors only with citation records of a certain magnitude and those authors with fewer citations are left out in the analysis. Therefore, author co-citation analysis of expatriate literature may only identify highly co-cited authors and display their interrelationships from the citation record. Other approaches, especially qualitative analysis and reviews, should be used in conjunction with these analyses for an in-depth and comprehensive examination.

In our study, we only reviewed briefly expatriate management studies that appeared on our top centrality list of each developmental stage. Due to the limitation of our database (we only used SSCI), the results of our study should be taken cautiously. Moreover, due to the time lag, many recent articles did not show high centrality in our co-citation network. Our study offers more of a historical review of the development of expatriate management field, rather than judging the importance of different authors or articles. The omission of the recent works is not due to their lack of importance, but purely our methodological limitations.

Implications and Future Directions

In accordance with the metaphor of choice of citations as an assiduous voting process (Doyle et al., 1996), a meticulous manual and computer-aided analysis of 17716 citations resulting from the votes of thousands of authors traces the development paths and paradigms of expatriate management studies in this paper. Instead of doing a detailed review of each article in our database, we used the co-citation network analysis technique to map the evolution of the expatriate management field. By doing this, we provide objective evidence for the influential publications in the field and the paradigm shift from a diverse research field at the earliest stage through to a more concentrated field at Stage 2 dominated by Black and his associates' framework (Black et al., 1991). The “jury is still out” on the impact of the research at Stage 3. Clearly, there is a sustained effect of the research and frameworks conducted by Black and his colleagues but part of this influence is due to the biasing aspect of the journal r本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。