What Is New About e-Human Resource Management? Deepening Through a Bibliometric Analysis

The purpose of this study is to map the conceptual structure of the body of knowledge regarding the research field named e-Human Resource Management, with the aim of depicting an updated picture and contributing to a better understanding of this stream. The research develops a bibliometric analysis of 184 articles resulting from the search, following two steps. First, the analysis of descriptive performance indicators identifies the main traits of the debate on e-HRM, in terms of publications, productive countries, as well as the publication’s impact of the target journals, number of citations per country and most cited articles in the dataset. Then, the study performs a co-word analysis to deepen the conceptual structure of the dataset. The results highlight a growing and spread academic interest in this research topic, especially in the recent few years, which confirms the usefulness of monitoring its evolution. It offers a basis to deepen how this interest is presented. The bibliometric analysis reveals that there are different streams of research in which the e-HRM debate is developed. Seven clusters were identified. Firstly, there is the predominant cluster covering the main issues (effectiveness, IoT, innovation), theories (TAM) and research methodology (SEM) within the domain. As well, other clusters highlight specific areas of interest. For example: the e-HRM in SMEs, the peculiar role of technology in managing personnel, the role of HR department. This paper contributes to the field by providing an examination of the current state of the art of research on e-HRM as well as identifying the current areas of speculation in the literature and may offer some suggestions for future development in the perspective of the new trends in HRM.