Three Decades of Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions Research: Mapping the Field and Paths Forward

Previous reviews of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have not provided an integrative and evolutionary analysis, and the academic literature generally reflects a fragmented research perspective. Therefore, this study combined a bibliometric analysis and text-mining to analyze the evolution of theories and topics as well as theory-topic co-occurrence. We also used a topic modelling technique to divide the articles into 10 subareas and further analyzed their subthemes and dynamics. Overall, we examined 1,197 articles published from 1989 to 2022. This study contributes to the current literature by providing data on theory-topic co-occurrence and its evolution in cross-border M&As, conducting theory-topic co-occurrence analysis that identifies popular research trends and provides new insights into how to integrate M&As practices with theories, identifying 10 sub-areas via bibliometric analysis and BERTopic modelling, and identifying key theories and emerging themes to be examined in future studies.