EXAMINATION OF THE EVOLUTIONARY DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL INNOVATION BY THE SCIENCE MAPPING METHOD

Purpose -  The main objective of this study is to investigate the evolution of the concept of social innovation from 1966 to the present day. Methodology- Bibliometric analysis enables researchers to examine statistically the country, author(s), cooperation among authors, citations, institutions, and published years of selected publications and to put forward the general structure of a certain discipline using obtained statistical findings. On the other hand, scientific mappling analysis is a method that concentrates on determining the evolution of a scientific field and its constrained scientific areas. In order to better understand how the evolution of the concept of social innovation changes and develops during the sample period, firstly, a bibliometric and secondly a scientific mapping analysis were performed and the findings were interpreted. Findings- SciMAT package program was used to perform scientific mapping analysis. Results reveal that there are 1,428 publications concentrating social innovation under Scopus database, while 58.1% (830) of them were articles, 16% (229) of them were conference papers, 11.2% (160) of them were book chapters and the rest of them was other publications.  Conclusion- A thematic change was generally found for the concept of social innovation for the sample period of 1966-2016. The corresponding thematic change was generally evolved by the prominence and the decline of some associated scientific areas.