published papers by developed and developing countries. It indicates that during the
past few years, researchers on WCM have focused much attention on developing
countries.
5. Citation analysis
Citations means that someone has referenced work of other author(s). The citation
analysis means studying cited references of a population of articles to find the most
influential works in the field. In this section, we examined the cited references of the
WCM articles to observe the quality of the articles and to find out the most important
articles of the research stream. We have used the citation information provided by
Google Scholar for the purpose of citation analysis. It has found that only 72 of the 126
articles were cited. One possible reason can be that most of the articles were recently
published during the period of 2011 and 2012. The 126 articles have 2,016 cited
references. Average reference number was 16 per article. The most-cited articles with at
least 10 citations are shown in the Table VI. Deloof (2003) is the most-cited article with
304 citations. Shin and Soenen (1998), Lazaridis and Tryfonidis (2006), García-Teruel
and Martínez-Solano (2007), Raheman and Nasr (2007) and Padachi (2006) were also
among the top five most-cited publications on WCM. Table VII present the most
referenced journals publishing work on WCM. Journal of Business Finance and
Accounting is most popular due to the article of Deloof (2003). International Review of
Business Research Papers with two articles has 193 citations.
6. Content analysis
Content analysis is a class of methods within social science that can be applied both in
quantitative and qualitative ways. In the detailed content analysis of selected articles, it
was found that most of the working capital research was concentrated on two main
aspects, impact ofWCMon firm’s profitability andWCMpractices. Various other issues
studied on WCM include impact of company characteristics and WCM and impact of
payment system in WCM. These articles were placed in “other” category. We have also
classified the research articles into method group, empirical, survey and other
(Table VIII).
6.1 WCM practices
Survey by Kim et al. (1992) studied theWCMpractices of Japanese firms in the USA. The
primary focus of survey was to determine the objective of WCM and identify major
options of short-term fund in Japanese firms operating in the USA. However, Belt and
Smith (1991) made an attempt to compare working capital practices of the USA and
Australia. This study, based on the survey of Smith and Sell, was published in 1980.