The Structural Influence of Marketing Journals: A Citation Analysis of the Discipline and its Subareas over Time

Abstract

The authors investigate the overall and subarea influence of a comprehensive set of marketing and marketing-related journals at three points in time during a 30-year period using a citation-based measure of structural influence. The results show that a few journals wield a disproportionate amount of influence in the marketing journal network as a whole and that influential journals tend to derive their influence from many different journals. Different journals are most influential in different subareas of marketing; general business and managerially oriented journals have lost influence, whereas more specialized marketing journals have gained in influence over time. The Journal of Marketing emerges as the most influential marketing journal in the final period (1996–97) and as the journal with the broadest span of influence across all subareas. Yet the Journal of Marketing is notably influential among applied marketing journals, which themselves are of lesser influence. The index of structural influence is significantly correlated with other objective and subjective measures of influence but least so with the impact factors reported in the Social Sciences Citation Index. Overall, the findings demonstrate the rapid maturation of the marketing discipline and the changing role of key journals in the process.