CLASSIFICATION OF CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE OF THE CAREER: A CO-WORD ANALYSIS

Abstract

In order to understand the progress and future of a research field that has reached a certain level of knowledge, it is necessary to analyze the subject patterns, research trends, conceptual structure and evolution from a historical perspective. A systematic review of the domain is required in order to consolidate its scattered theoretical and conceptual structure and reveal its evolutionary characteristics, since career is a scientific discipline that has been studied for many years, permeable with many different scientific fields, and received great interest from both academic and professional environments. With this study, it is aimed to reveal the conceptual structure of and the new developments in the field by systematically reviewing the studies, covering the years 1975 – to 2018, in the field. In this direction, common word analysis was performed by downloading the bibliometric data of the studies published within the scope of the Web of Science. As a result of the analysis, it has been observed that the studies in the field of career are gathered in three different clusters: i) organizational career management and environmental factors, ii) individual career management and career outputs, and iii) pre-career and career adventure. In addition, emerging concepts were examined. The findings were discussed by comparing the literature.