Hidden Trends in 90 Years of Harvard Business Review

TL;DR

This study analyzes 90 years of Harvard Business Review abstracts using text mining techniques to uncover hidden trends in international relations, sentiment, companies, inventions, and influential figures.

Contribution

It applies a comprehensive text mining approach to a large historical dataset to reveal previously unnoticed patterns and insights in business and management literature.

Findings

Identifies trends in international relationships over decades

Analyzes sentiment shifts in HBR abstracts

Highlights key companies, inventions, and influential figures

Abstract

In this paper, we demonstrate and discuss results of our mining the abstracts of the publications in Harvard Business Review between 1922 and 2012. Techniques for computing n-grams, collocations, basic sentiment analysis, and named-entity recognition were employed to uncover trends hidden in the abstracts. We present findings about international relationships, sentiment in HBR's abstracts, important international companies, influential technological inventions, renown researchers in management theories, US presidents via chronological analyses.