Scientific Domain Analysis of Professional Competences

The emerging paradigm of skills has been studied by different disciplines, and it has generated a broad spectrum of research literature regarding competences, both work and executive competencies, but there is not necessarily agreement among authors on the definition of the term.Through this paper we attempt to give an approximation of the intellectual structure of research related to professional competences. Our aim, through reflection on the approaches and trends of the use of this term, is to contribute to improving the work of professionals in raising awareness of the implicit and explicit aspects of the term and how subjective it can be. Using scientific domain analysis, a new paradigm of information science, we studied the set of publications in journals listed in the multidisciplinary databases: “Web of Science” and “Scopus” from 1950 to mid-2012.The maps generated using the scientific visualization software “Citespace II” allowed us to visualize the lines of research, specialties and trends of the professional competences wherein we identified eight groups formed from characteristics and common research topics.