Identifying the “Invisible Colleges” of the Industrial & Labor Relations Review: A Bibliometric Approach

Since its inaugural issue in 1947, the Industrial and Labor Relations Review (ILRR) has been considered among the foremost industrial relations journals. Prominent among subjects treated by ILRRs articles in the journal's early years were collective bargaining and industrial strife, but the subject mix has changed greatly with the times. This paper employs bibliometric techniques to compare ILRR's intellectual bases across three recent periods: 1974–1984, 1985–1995, and 1996–2006. Using co-citation and network analyses, the authors identify the “invisible colleges”—research networks that refer to each other in their publications—of ILRR Economics-oriented journals were heavily cited by ILRR authors across the entire 33-year observation period, but there is evidence that another field, human resource management, was of growing importance in the most recent years.