Intellectual capital efficiency and firm performance: A bibliometric analysis across COVID 19 periods

This study maps research relevant to intellectual capital efficiency (ICE) and firm performance using 846 Scopus-indexed journal publications from 2015 to 2025.Publication and citation analysis, author and institutional productivity rankings, and a pooled keyword co-occurrence map describe the literature.Three operational periods are distinguished: pre-COVID-19 (2015 to 2019), COVID-19 onset (2020), and post-COVID-19 (2021 to 2025), with the final label referring to a publication window rather than the end of the pandemic.The periods contain 247, 98, and 501 publications, respectively; annual output increased from 36 in 2015 to 110 in 2025.The corpus accumulated 26,877 citations at extraction.Xu Jian recorded the highest reported author output, while Qingdao Agricultural University recorded the highest reported institutional output.Intellectual capital, knowledge management, and financial performance were prominent keywords.Highly cited studies illustrate financial, innovation, and organizational performance perspectives, including research on SME hotels.These patterns identify connections between efficiency measurement and knowledge deployment, but do not establish a causal effect of COVID-19 or validate ICE as a dynamic capability.The study develops a research agenda for contextual comparisons, longitudinal analysis, and sustainability measurement while acknowledging database, citation-age and network-reproducibility limitations.