Entrepreneurial intention research asks what makes people, usually students, intend to start a business. Its most-cited paper, Krueger, Reilly and Carsrud (2000), compares competing models of intention, and the theory of planned behaviour runs through the list from Krueger and Carsrud (1993) to Kautonen et al. (2015). Liñán and Chen (2009) developed a questionnaire and tested it in Spain and Taiwan. The big applied question is whether entrepreneurship education raises intention, and the meta-analysis by Bae et al. (2014) found a significant but small correlation.
How the literature is organised
Much of this literature surveys students, as the titles of the recent papers on this page show, and measures the components of an intention model.
The theory arrives in the early 1990s. Krueger and Carsrud (1993) applied the theory of planned behaviour to entrepreneurship, and Boyd and Vozikis (1994) added self-efficacy. Krueger, Reilly and Carsrud (2000) tested competing models of intention against each other. Zhao, Seibert and Hills (2005) showed that self-efficacy mediated the effects of learning, experience and risk propensity on intention. Liñán and Chen (2009) developed an instrument to measure entrepreneurial intention and applied it across two cultures.
Synthesis followed: Zhao, Seibert and Lumpkin (2010) on personality, Bae et al. (2014) on education and the systematic review by Liñán and Fayolle (2015), which organises the field into themes and sets a research agenda.
Main debates
The first question is whether intention leads to behaviour. Kautonen et al. (2015) addressed it with longitudinal data because such studies were scarce. The second is how much education matters, given the small pooled correlation in Bae et al. (2014). The third is generalisability across cultures, which Liñán and Chen (2009) approached by testing one instrument in two rather different countries and which the recent country studies continue.
Where recent work is heading
Recent highly cited papers are mostly single-country studies, often adding one construct to the base model: the university ecosystem (Elnadi and Gheith, 2021), environmental awareness (Barba-Sánchez et al., 2022), mindset and creativity (Jiatong et al., 2021) or individual entrepreneurial orientation (Hassan et al., 2021). Reviews since 2022 consolidate the factors (Maheshwari, Kha and Arokiasamy, 2023) and map the field scientometrically (Batista-Canino et al., 2024). If you plan another student survey, a longitudinal follow-up of the kind Kautonen et al. (2015) used is one way to add to it.
Most-cited foundational papers
Published before 2021 and ranked by how often later work cites them. Read the abstract of each and the full text of the three or four closest to your question. Citation count measures attention, not quality, so treat this as a map of what the field has argued about rather than a ranking of what is true.
Teemu Kautonen, Marco van Gelderen, Matthias Fink (2015). Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice.
Cited by 1,428Open accessdoi:10.1111/etap.12056
Most-cited papers since 2021
Primary studies and conceptual papers from 2021 onwards. A paper published in 2024 has had a few years to accumulate citations where the works in the section above have had decades, so compare these counts with each other rather than with the ones above.
Aamir Hassan and 4 others (2021). Industry and Higher Education.
Cited by 203doi:10.1177/09504222211007051
Recent reviews and meta-analyses
The fastest way into a literature. A good review gives you the structure of the field, a reference list to mine and, in its limitations section, the gaps other researchers have already spotted.
How big the literature is, and where it is published
OpenAlex indexes 9,248 works whose title matches this topic. The chart shows how many were published each year from 2000 to 2025; the current year is left out because it is incomplete.
Show the numbers as a table
Year
Works
2000
6
2001
6
2002
5
2003
12
2004
15
2005
23
2006
24
2007
33
2008
50
2009
63
2010
75
2011
106
2012
166
2013
192
2014
263
2015
298
2016
338
2017
442
2018
441
2019
578
2020
717
2021
661
2022
707
2023
827
2024
955
2025
1,084
Journals behind the most-cited work
Counted across the 375 most-cited works on the topic, not across everything published. Browsing recent issues of the first two or three is a reliable way to find current work that has not yet been cited much.
International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal28 papers
The International Journal of Management Education28 papers
Frontiers in Psychology25 papers
Sustainability19 papers
Education + Training16 papers
Journal of Business Research15 papers
Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice13 papers
International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research12 papers
Search strings to copy
Written for databases that accept Boolean operators (Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, PubMed, EBSCO). Quotation marks keep a phrase together, an asterisk stands in for the end of a word, and OR groups go in brackets. British and American spellings are written out with OR rather than covered by a single-character wildcard, because those wildcards differ between databases: PubMed’s help page documents the asterisk only, and asks for at least four characters before it. Limit the search to title and abstract first; widen it only if you get too little. Our guide to starting a literature review covers how to record what you searched.
Core search
("entrepreneurial intention*" OR "entrepreneurial intent" OR "intention to start a business") AND (student* OR graduate*)
Entrepreneurship education
("entrepreneurial intention*") AND ("entrepreneurship education" OR "entrepreneurial education" OR program* OR course*)
From intention to action
("entrepreneurial intention*") AND ((behaviour* OR behavior*) OR action OR "start-up" OR "nascent entrepreneur*") AND (longitudinal OR "follow-up")
Explore entrepreneurial intention in Wonders →Opens Wonders on this question. Once you are signed in it becomes a project with suggested sub-topics and keywords you can edit before searching. The trial is 14 days.
Sub-topics to narrow into
A thesis-sized question usually sits inside one of these, combined with a population or a setting.
Theory of planned behaviour models
Krueger and Carsrud (1993), Krueger, Reilly and Carsrud (2000) and the robustness test by Kautonen et al. (2015).
Boyd and Vozikis (1994) and Zhao, Seibert and Hills (2005) on self-efficacy as mediator.
Entrepreneurship education
Souitaris, Zerbinati and Al-Laham (2007) and the Bae et al. (2014) meta-analysis.
Personality
Zhao, Seibert and Lumpkin (2010) meta-analysed personality, intentions and performance.
Measurement across cultures
Liñán and Chen (2009) tested their instrument on a sample from Spain and Taiwan.
How to cite these papers
Every paper above has a DOI, a part of the reference that is easy to leave out. Here is one of them, “Competing models of entrepreneurial intentions” (2000), in the two styles students ask about most:
APA 7th edition
Krueger, N. F., Jr., Reilly, M. D., & Carsrud, A. L. (2000). Competing models of entrepreneurial intentions. Journal of Business Venturing, 15(5–6), 411–432. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0883-9026(98)00033-0
MLA 9th edition
Krueger, Norris F., Jr., et al. “Competing Models of Entrepreneurial Intentions.” Journal of Business Venturing, vol. 15, no. 5–6, 2000, pp. 411–32, https://doi.org/10.1016/s0883-9026(98)00033-0.
Check the details against the article itself before you submit: databases, including the one behind this page, sometimes carry the online-first year rather than the volume year. Full rules and more examples are in our guides to APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver and ABNT, with the rest in the citation guides. You can also format a reference from its DOI with our free citation tools.
Frequently asked questions
Which theory is used most in entrepreneurial intention research?
On this page it is the theory of planned behaviour: Krueger and Carsrud (1993) applied it to entrepreneurial intentions, and Kautonen et al. (2015) tested its robustness in predicting intentions and later actions. Krueger, Reilly and Carsrud (2000) compare competing models. Liñán and Fayolle (2015) review the whole literature and its themes. Cite the theory itself from its original source, which is outside this list.
Does entrepreneurship education work?
Bae et al. (2014) meta-analysed 73 studies with 37,285 individuals and found a significant but small correlation between entrepreneurship education and intention, larger than the correlation for business education in general. Souitaris, Zerbinati and Al-Laham (2007) ask the question directly for science and engineering students; read their paper for the mechanisms they test.
Do intentions turn into businesses?
Kautonen et al. (2015) used longitudinal survey data from 2011 and 2012 on 969 adults in Austria and Finland and found that the theory of planned behaviour predicted both start-up intentions and subsequent behaviour. They note that studies of how intentions translate into behaviour were scarce, and that most earlier samples were narrow in scope.
How this page was made
The lists come from OpenAlex, an open index of scholarly works whose data are published under a CC0 licence, queried on September 21, 2026 for works whose title matches ("entrepreneurial intention" OR "entrepreneurial intentions" OR "entrepreneurial intent"). Only works with a DOI are listed. Each one was checked against the publisher’s own record at Crossref or DataCite (title, year, first author, journal, volume and pages), and in three cases, where the publisher deposited no byline, against PubMed; anything OpenAlex or Crossref flags as retracted was left out, and an editor took out results that matched the words but not the subject. Citation counts are OpenAlex’s on that date and are usually lower than Google Scholar’s, which counts more kinds of document. Ranking by citations tells you what a field has relied on, not what is correct; several heavily cited papers on any topic are cited because later work disputes them. Books without a DOI are missing, which matters in fields where the founding text is a book.
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