Stefan Stremersch, Isabel Verniers, & Peter C. Verhoef
Executive Summary
Although academics recognize the importance of article citations for their academic career, little research has been done on the drivers of citations in the marketing discipline. The main purpose of this study is to gain insight into why some articles in marketing receive more citations than other articles. These insights may be relevant to marketing practitioners as well. To address the issue, this study examines all articles in a sample of the five major marketing journals (International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science,and Journal of Consumer Research) from 1990 to 2002.
The authors introduce three scientometric perspectives to explain the influence of author and article characteristics on article citations. First, they discern the universalist perspective, which argues that citations are driven by what the authors say. Article quality (article order, awards, and article length) and article domain (article orientation, method type, and subject area) are the two dimensions of this perspective. Second, there is the social constructivist perspective, which argues that citations are driven by who the authors are. The two dimensions in this perspective are author visibility (publication productivity, editorial board membership, business school rankings, author centrality, U.S. affiliation, and number of authors) and personal promotion (reference and self-reference intensity). Third, there is the presentation perspective, which argues that citations are driven by how the authors say what they say. The different dimensions in this perspective are title length, the use of attention grabbers, and expositional clarity.
The results indicate that the number of citations an article receives (controlled for time) depends on "what is said" (universalism) and on "who says it" (social constructivism), not on "how it is said" (presentation). The study's findings generate useful implications for both scientific stakeholders (as they strive to maximize citations) and marketing practitioners.
With regard to marketing practitioners, this study informs them on the evolution of different characteristics of the academic marketing journals and their relevance to decisions they face. Furthermore, it shows that it is challenging to make marketing journals more accessible to marketing practitioners. First, authors who are visible to academics are not necessarily visible to practitioners. Second, increasing the readability of an article could influence practitioners in a substantive way, but at the same time, it could be detrimental for academic impact (the results show that readability influences citations negatively because it may come at the detriment of credibility).
In general, this study raises the issue of the extent to which articles assessed by academics to be of high quality are also managerially relevant. Additional research should be conducted to examine the impact of marketing science on marketing practice and how to foster such impact.
Biography
Stefan Stremersch is Professor of Marketing in the School of Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Visiting Associate Professor of Marketing, Emory University. He received his PhD in Economics and Business Administration from Tilburg University, the Netherlands. During his doctoral education, he was a visiting scholar at University of Southern California from 1999 to 2001. His current research interest is in innovation diffusion and the marketing of technology and science. His work has appeared in leading scholarly journals, such as International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Marketing Science. His work has been covered by both the national and the international press (e.g., The Economist). He has won prestigious awards, such as the Harold H. Maynard Best Paper Award form the Journal of Marketing (2002) and the J.C. Ruigrok Prize for the most productive young researcher in the social sciences in the Netherlands. He also recently received the 2004 Research Prize at Erasmus University Rotterdam for outstanding research performance. He is an editorial board member of several journals, including Journal of Marketing, and chaired the INFORMS Marketing Science Conference (2004). He also serves as coeditor (with Don Lehmann) of International Journal of Research in Marketing. He has extensive consulting experience with technology companies, such as Siemens, IBM, Alcatel, and Dell, and often cooperates with various governments and European institutions. He has an extensive teaching record at the undergraduate and graduate levels in economics (at Erasmus University) and at the MBA level in business (at Goizueta Business School, Emory University).
Isabel Verniers is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Marketing, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, at Ghent University, Belgium. She holds a Master of Science in Applied Economics from Ghent University, Belgium.
Peter C. Verhoef is Professor of Marketing in the Department of Marketing, Faculty of Economics, at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He obtained his PhD in 2001 from the School of Economics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His research interests are customer management, customer loyalty, multichannel issues, category management, and buying behavior of organic products. He has extensively published on these topics. His publications have appeared in Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Marketing Letters, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and Journal of Retailing. His work has been awarded with the Donald R. Lehmann award for the best dissertation-based article in Journal of Marketing and Journal of Marketing Research in 2003. He is currently an editorial board member of Journal of Marketing, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Service Research, and International Journal of Electronic Commerce. He has extensive teaching experience with undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students. He is also involved in executive teaching on customer management. He has consulting experience for several companies, such as KPN and Achmea.
Journal of Marketing, Vol. 71, No. 3, July 2007
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