Historical and comparative perspectives on MMR in business, the social sciences and medicine

This chapter provides a historical account of the use of mixed methods research (MMR) by examining publishing trends across the last three decades. An overview of the historic development of MMR is presented with an emphasis on key business MMR publications to provide the evolutionary context of this third methodology. We undertake bibliographic mapping to produce a comparative scan of published MMR across three broad Scopus subject areas (business, social sciences, and medicine) before analysing these MMR publications and displaying the results through VOSViewer software. We identify dominant themes in each domain and list the 20 highest cited MMR publications overall. The evolution of MMR and its increasing adoption as evidenced in this study heralds a promising future for methodological innovation and thought leadership. There is always room for methodological refinement, however, and we advocate for more provocative boundary-crossing paradigmatic and methodological thinking that reflects the increasingly complex and disrupted nature of the world we research.