Mapping Entrepreneurship Education Research across CNKI and WoS: A Comparative Bibliometric Analysis and a CMO Research Agenda

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education has become an established area of higher education research, but its development across publication corpora remains incompletely understood. This study compares two database-specific corpora: 3,064 English-language articles indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection and classified in the education category, and 3,649 Chinese-language journal articles from CSSCI sources in the education category and indexed in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure. CiteSpace was used to analyze publication trends, keyword co-occurrence networks, clusters, and keyword bursts. Citation evidence was analysed separately because the available CNKI export did not support the same CiteSpace co-citation procedure. WoS cited references were examined through co-citation clustering, whereas the five CNKI articles with the highest platform-specific citation counts were coded descriptively. Both corpora focused on higher education, students, and entrepreneurship education. CNKI output peaked in 2017 and then declined, whereas WoS output continued to increase through 2024. The WoS corpus gave greater prominence to self-efficacy, impact, performance, and model-based analysis. The CNKI corpus emphasized talent cultivation, entrepreneurial competence, and innovation and entrepreneurship. These patterns are consistent with a mechanism and evaluation orientation in WoS and a reform and implementation orientation in CNKI. This interpretation does not establish institutional or policy causation. The study presents a Context-Mechanism-Outcome research agenda for future empirical testing. The findings apply to the retrieved and screened corpora rather than to Chinese or worldwide entrepreneurship education research as a whole.