Leadership as an Autonomous Research Field: A Bibliometric Analysis

This paper examines whether leadership as a research area is becoming an autonomous field. Our main argument is that leadership is emerging as one of the fastest growing academic fields in higher education, demonstrating considerable increases in the number of publications and citations in the field. This growth is not affected by the low percent of funding in this research area. The surge in the number of authors and scholarly contributions ensures the continued development of this field. Furthermore, leadership is becoming institutionalized as a field of study in academia. In light of these findings, we argue that there are positive indications that leadership will become an autonomous research field in the near future.