What do we know about IA?

Based on a content analysis of 112 papers on international alliances (IAs), we attempt to unveil the approach used by International Business (IB) researchers to deal with two type of problems normally associated to IAs research: the classification of an international alliances in a scenario where different terminology is used and different concepts to refer to the phenomena are considered interchangeably; the absence of a reliable and complete database where all IAs can be reported and therefore investigated for the sake of knowledge creation. Throughout our research, we realize that even though this is an evident and pertinent issue on IAs studies, many researchers sidestep the problem without even noticing that this is a concern in IB research, which may bias obtained results.