Accumulating Knowledge Over Time: Introduction to the Fourth FBR Review Issue

We are honored to present the fourth Review Issue of Family Business Review (FBR). In 2016, FBR Editors Jeremy C. Short, Pramodita Sharma, Thomas Lumpkin, and Allison W. Pearson launched a series of special issues in FBR to track and understand the fast evolution of family business research produced since the early 1970s. With more than 2,000 family business articles published in the 1990s (Sharma, 2015), and more than 4,000 articles published between 2010 and 2014, they anticipated that the 2020s “would likely yield over 8,000 new peer-reviewed journal articles on family business” (Short et al., 2016, p. 11). Based on the Scopus database at the time we write this editorial (January 2022), we now found 20,041 document results containing the keyword “family business.” Clearly, as it stands, scholarly production on the subject has further grown, accelerating even beyond those ambitious expectations made just 5 years ago. This fast-growing trend raised the need to organize an increasingly diversified body of knowledge and shape the production of new knowledge in a way that adds and extends on what has been done before, to ultimately favor knowledge accumulation.