Kolltveit, Bjørn Johs.; Karlsen, Jan Terje; Grønhaug, Kjell: Perspectives on Project Management; in: International Journal of Project Management, Vol. 25 (2007), No. 1, pp. 3-9.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2005.12.002
Kolltveit et al. analyse the perspective of research articles and books published between 1983-2004 in the International Journal of Project Management. In total they mark 2977 observations of one of their 6 identified perspectives (task, leadership, business, transaction, systems, stakeholder). They characterize the average book on project management to contain 21% of knowledge on tasks, 51% on leadership, 10% on business, 8% on transactions, 5% on stakeholders, and 5% on systems.
Furthermore Kolltveit et al. describe theories of each perspective and key issues/research topics for each perspective. Plus they show the distribution over time, which shows a slightly decreasing trend for the task and systems perspective, whereas business and leadership perspectives are growing.