State of the art on the Systems of Innovation research: a bibliometrics study up to 2009

Over the last decades there has been a growing interest on developing research and formulating public policy by using the Innovation Systems approach. However, as evidenced on the academic literature there is a lack of systematic, chronological and synthesizing studies indicating how this field has evolved over time. This paper has as main objective to consolidate the state of the art of academic research on IS, based on a bibliometrics study on literature published over the past 35 years. The results are discussed under the following perspectives: general results, chronological distribution, author relevance, articles and cited references of relevance, journals relevance and institutions and countries relevance. The paper ends with a discussion of the main implications and limitations of the study.