Evolution and Intellectual-conceptual Foundations of Research in the Field of Human Resources Analytics

Human Resources Analytics (HRA) was considered to replace decision-making based on intuition and experience with data-driven decisions, thereby connecting human resources functions with business outcomes through quantitative analysis. As this area is still in its infancy, it requires extensive examination from both theoretical and practical perspectives. To contribute to the literature on this topic, this study seeks to review the evolution of research and extract the intellectual-conceptual foundations of human resources analytics.

In relation to the article's purpose, relevant research published between 1991 and 2022 was extracted from the Web of Science database and analyzed using VOS Viewer software. Descriptive, co-authorship, co-citation, and keyword co-occurrence analyses were performed on the collected data. Specifically, co-citation analysis was used to extract the intellectual-conceptual foundations of the subject.

Research findings revealed that in terms of quantity, the highest number of articles were published on this topic in 2017. The highest number of citations was recorded in 2022. Ulrich and Dave are the most cited researchers, Human Resource Management was the most cited journal, and the University of Southern California was the most cited university. Co-citation analysis, which expresses intellectual-conceptual foundations in the field, presented the literature on human resources analytics in the form of four clusters. The first cluster showed the "nature and necessity of human resources analytics", the second cluster focused on the discussion of "the link between human resources analytics and technology", the third cluster was formed around the topic of "human resources analytics and data science", and finally the fourth cluster was called “the dark strain of human resource analytics.

The topic of human resource analytics has a research history of about two decades in the world, although the process of published research in this field has been very fast. The structural dispersion of the research of the four clusters counted in this research shows that a so-called "bird's eye view" is required in human resources analytics. Furthermore, the most important weakness of research or even projects carried out in the field of human resources analytics is the limitation of work to people with human resources expertise or technical expertise, which deserves cooperation between these two types of expertise in the form of interdisciplinary collaboration.