This article aims to provide a bibliometric analysis of intellectual capital research published in the Scopus database from 1956 to 2020 to trace the development of scientific activities that can pave the way for future studies by shedding light on the gaps in the field. The analysis focuses on 638 intellectual capital-related papers published in the Scopus database over 60 years, drawing upon a bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer. This paper highlights the mainstream of the current research in the intellectual capital field, based on the Scopus database, by presenting a detailed bibliometric analysis of the trend and development of intellectual capital research in the past six decades, including journals, authors, countries, institutes, co-occurrence, and author’s keywords. The findings imply that intellectual capital researchers do not use broad relevant theories and findings from studies beyond their clusters. Another result is that developing nations continue to be underexplored in terms of intellectual property research due to a lack of trust representation and a lack of appropriate investigators. Finally, the data analysis identifies a number of potential research issues to be investigated regarding intellectual capital development, which serve as raw material for future research. Once again, this study provides a framework for firms to build and implement intellectual capital development plans.

Understanding of intellectual capital’s influence on the firm performance has received immense interest in recent years. In this view, the impact of various intellectual capital components, including human, structural, and relational capital, on the performance of small- and medium-sized Malaysian manufacturing enterprises were examined. A correlation between intellectual capital and firm performance were established based on the mediating role of innovation capability. To achieve this goal, a stratified sampling method was used wherein 262 participants’ responses from the focused manufacturing firms were obtained and analyzed via the structural equation model (SEM) and resource-based view (RBV). Statistical tools like SPSS.v²⁵ and SmartPLS.v³ were used. The results showed that the relationship between intellectual capital and firm performance was strengthened due to the mediation of innovation capability, thereby gaining higher competitive advantages. It was asserted that the present comprehensive analyses may offer a useful information and guidance to the academics, owners/managers, and policymakers involving the impact of intellectual capital development towards improving the Malaysian SMEs performance.