In project management it is commonly accepted that the interests of stakeholders need to be dealt with to support the success of a project. By doing a meta-analysis of project management literature it is investigated how the stakeholder notion is used in this literature. Forty two publications are assessed against the purpose of this notion, the stakeholder definition and how the identification of stakeholders is addressed. The analysis shows that only a minority of the publications provides a clear definition and addresses the identification of stakeholders. We argue that a role perspective on the stakeholders issue fits the project context and therefore could fill this gap in the project management literature. After comparing the stakeholder approach with project role classifications from the literature, we conclude that a role-based stakeholder identification method is a promising approach for identifying stakeholders in projects.