Investigating the current state and impact of the intellectual capital academic discipline

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to: investigate the current state of intellectual capital (IC) as an academic discipline, and explore the impact of IC on the state of practice. Design/methodology/approach The most influential articles published in the Journal of Intellectual Capital were identified. Analysis of their cited and citing works was done. Findings The IC discipline: first, successfully disseminates its knowledge beyond the English-language world but ignores research published in languages other than English; second, has higher self-citation rates; third, uses books for the development of its theoretical foundation; fourth, successfully converts experiential knowledge into academic knowledge; fifth, exerts a limited yet potentially increasing practical impact; and sixth, is at the theoretical consolidation stage of pre-science and is progressing toward becoming a reference discipline. No anomalies in the development of the IC discipline were observed. Practical implications IC researchers should pay more attention to works published in non-English journals. Given the status of IC as a professional discipline, they should continue using non-peer reviewed sources to convert experiential knowledge into academic knowledge. They also need to promote their research far beyond the traditional IC domain. Originality/value To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first empirical analysis of the IC discipline from the reference discipline perspective.