The rise of cultural and creative industries in creative economy research: a bibliometric analysis

The chapter presents the evolution of the creative economy in academic research. The study has a twofold objective. First, it aims to contribute to address the fragmentation of the literature on the creative economy, and second, to lay the foundation for an economic study of the cultural and creative industries (CCIs). Following a bibliometric approach, authors analyse all publications collected from the ISI Web of Science database, starting from 1998 and ending in 2016 (around 1.600 publications). Following this, they apply a co-citation analysis developed using social network analysis, thereby exploring the founders and disseminators of CCIs. Results underline that CCIs are not only the major topic in Creative Economy Research, but this trend has become even stronger in the last few years. In addition, this evidence strongly confirms the relevance of the CCIs in the contemporary economy. This importance can only be expected to grow in the future. This last result supports the hypothesis concerning the foundation of an economics of creative industries.