Who’s Doing What: A Ten-Year Bibliometric Review of VOLUNTAS

• In Event: Revisiting third sector literature

Abstract

Nonprofit & civil society scholars have a growing number of viable journals to consider when seeking to publish their research, in part because the study of the nonprofit sector & civil society has significant breadth, which translates into an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Still, there are a small set of journals that have long been viewed as core publication outlets for nonprofit and civil society scholarship (Brudney & Herman, 2004; Ma & Konrath, 2018). One of these journals is VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, which is the official journal of the International Society for Third-Sector Research (ISTR). VOLUNTAS is an interdisciplinary journal, curating international research on voluntary and nonprofit organizations & presenting leading-edge academic arguments around civil society issues to researchers & practitioners, and today the journal is considered one of the top-tiered quality outlets for nonprofit and civil society scholars (Walk & Andersson, 2020).

As scholarly interest in civil society, NGOs, philanthropy, social economy, volunteering, social enterprise continues to evolve and grow globally, VOLUNTAS (in line with the mission of ISTR) has an ever more important role to play as a plural outlet for research (Simsa & Brandsen, 2021). Recognizing the locus of VOLUNTAS as a top-tier journal in its field and the fast-growing significance of the type of research pursued by this journal, the purpose of this study is to offer a comprehensive overview of articles published in the VOLUNTAS from 2014-2023, with objectives to map and examine the nature of research being published over the past decade.

Although prior research investigations of nonprofit research production and publication patterns have included/covered articles in VOLUNTAS (e.g., Ma & Konrath, 2018; Walk & Andersson, 2020; LePere-Schloop & Nesbit, 2023), this research attempts to do a deeper dive into the past decade of VOLUNTAS publications. Towards that end, this in-depth review will examine the following questions: (i) what are the topics in discussion in the journal’s volumes till present? (ii) what do the author demographics appear to be (origin, institutions, gender etc.) (iii) which methodologies are predominantly used? (iv) what are the key metrics utilized to evaluate impact? and lastly, (iv) where are the gaps that highlight spaces for future research? This qualitative study will be guided by these questions to identify popular topics, contexts, categories and methods of interest to researchers worldwide, while emphasizing their impact or lack thereof, using descriptive content and bibliometric network analysis.

Three analytical approaches – bibliometric, methodological and content analysis – will be used to select and review articles published in the journal. This research would showcase the development of various epistemological branches within the third sector, it would also highlight the gaps in literature and practice, the potential avenues for future research and the limitations of current standards for evaluating impact in a practice-oriented field as third-sector research.

We are currently collecting and organizing our data, and therefore it is too early to speculate about any key findings, yet we expect to have the analysis completed and ready to be presented at the conference.

References

Brudney, J. L., & Herman, R. D. (2004). Reader’s perceptions of philanthropy and nonprofit management journals. American Review of Public Administration, 34, 293-301.

LePere-Schloop, M., & Nesbit, R. (2023). Disciplinary contributions to nonprofit studies: A 20-year empirical mapping of journals publishing nonprofit research and journal citations by nonprofit scholars. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 52(1_suppl), 68S-101S.

Ma, J., & S. Konrath (2018). A century of nonprofit studies: Scaling the knowledge of the field. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 29, 1139-1158.

Simsa, R., & Brandsen, T. (2021). The evolution of third sector research and the journal voluntas: The editors’ impressions. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 32, 1-2.

Walk, M., & Andersson, F. O. (2020). Where do nonprofit and civil society researchers publish? Perceptions of nonprofit journal quality. Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs, 6(1), 79-95.

Authors

• Iman Fathima Sheik Abdullah

• Fredrik O. Andersson, Indiana University