1. Productivity and Collaboration in the Talent Management field (1990- 2013)* INTRODUCTION: Why is it worth asking how much do we know about Talent Management research? Eva Gallardo-Gallardo 1,2, Pedro Gallo 2 & Nicky Dries 3 1 Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 2 Universitat de Barcelona & 3 KU Leuven The well-known phrase ‘the war for talent’ introduced by a group of McKinsey consultants in late 1990s sparked off the interest for talent management (TM). Over the last two decades, TM has become an increasingly popular topic (Chuai, Preece, & Iles, 2008; Höglund, 2012) and TM literature has experienced substantial growth, especially in recent years (Jones, 2008; Iles, Preece, & Chuai, 2010). Indeed, deep in an economic downturn, TM is seen as a key management issue for organizations worldwide (Bhatnagar, 2008; Mäkelä, Björkman, & Ehrnrooth, 2010; Thunnissen, Boselie & Fruytier, 2013), since it is considered a critical element for organizational success and sustainability. TM is hot! Despite its growing popularity there is a lack of clarity regarding TM definition, scope and overall goals (Collings & Mellahi, 2009; Garrow & Hirsh, 2008; Lewis & Heckman, 2006). Although Thunnissen, Boselie and Fruytier (2013) made an attempt to provide a critical review of the academic literature on TM, there has been no full review study of the scientific production about it. Hence, a ‘research on research’ analysis will contribute towards a better understanding of TM more generally, and of the academic progress and remaining gaps thus far specifically. METHODOLOGY: Bibliometric analysis. A sequential three-step approach was followed: TM literature is characterized by an initial very moderate start in terms of publications and collaborations followed by a rather intense increase in both dimensions, as it is expected from a discipline that is still developing. It shows a great amount of dispersion in journals and authors which is another unambiguous statement of the immaturity of the field. Collaborations are quite recent in time, and mostly occur within the same organization. CONCLUSIONS: TM is a quite new field that fights for consolidation Any doubts/suggestions/comments? Contact me: egallardog@uoc.edu SOME FINDINGS: This paper is the first one to address a complete and in-depth analysis of the structure of the TM field as an academic discipline. It will allow new researchers into the field to be fully aware of seminal authors and must- read articles, as well as identifying those journals and institutions most closely related to this subject. Productivity: Collaboration (co-authorship): OBJECTIVE: To offer objective data that describe the reality of the TM research focusing on productivity and collaboration Step 1: Data retrieval Searches on TM in WoS and Scopus Keywords: ‘talent’ and ‘management’’ (in title, abstract/topic or Keywords) Period of time considered: 1990 – 2013 (until May) Limited to those published in English in peer-reviewed journals and those that have the full text available. Step 2: Refinement of the results The information of the articles retrieved from each search were exported to Microsoft Excel 2011 Duplicates articles were removed  List of 735 publications Full text was obtained  32 publications were impossible to find or acquire  703 final number of publications Step 3: Data codification Each publication was codified according to 42 different fields, such as: article ID, Number of authors, Author’s position, Family Name, name, Affiliation, Country, Co-authored?, International collaboration, collaboration within the same institution or with Spanish institutions, year, title, Journal title, Volume, Issue, Impact Factor, initial page, final page, number of references, Abstract, Keywords (up to 6). Scientific production in time: Dispersion of the scientific production: -Wide variety of journals (353 in total; average papers per journal = 1.99) -These journals can be subsumed under three wide areas: HRM, Knowledge Management and Health Management. -TM research is scattered in 49 countries : Authors’ productivity: -It is low -Average papers per author = 1.12 -2.12% of the authors published more than 2 articles; 0.86% more than 4. Institutional distribution of publications: -The most productive institution was Harvard University (26 papers), followed by the National University of Ireland (17 papers), IBM (16 papers) and Accenture (15 papers).  Among the top 5 institutions more than half are companies or consultancies. -Non-academic contributions from USA can be the cause of the extended belief that TM literature is mainly practitioner oriented Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Collaboration index ration of 0.55 authors per document. 428 documents out of 703 were written in collaboration  60.88% of the documents were co-authored. Figure 6 Figure 5 The most common collaboration is between 2 authors, followed by signatures of 3 authors. International collaboration is low and it is quite recent! The Spanish number of collaborations is growing but it is mainly within the same university. * This paper has already been presented at the 2nd EIASM Workshop on Talent Management (Brussels, October 2013)