Identifying research fields within business and management: a journal cross-citation analysis

Abstract

A discipline such as business and management (B&M) is very broad and has many fields within it, ranging from fairly scientific ones such as management science or economics to softer ones such as information systems. There are at least three reasons why it is important to identify these sub-fields accurately. First, to give insight into the structure of the subject area and identify perhaps unrecognised commonalities; second, for the purpose of normalising citation data as it is well-known that citation rates vary significantly between different disciplines. And third, because journal rankings and lists tend to split their classifications into different subjects-for example, the Association of Business Schools list, which is a standard in the UK, has 22 different fields. Unfortunately, at the moment these are created in an ad-hoc manner with no underlying rigour. The purpose of this paper is to identify possible sub-fields in B&M rigorously based on actual citation patterns. We have examined 450 journals in B&M, which are included in the ISI Web of Science and analysed the cross-citation rates between them enabling us to generate sets of coherent and consistent sub-fields that minimise the extent to which journals appear in several categories. Implications and limitations of the analysis are discussed.

A review of theory and practice in scientometrics

“…The problem is not just between disciplines but also within disciplines such as business and management which encompass different types of research fields. Mingers and Leydesdorff (2014) found that management and strategy papers averaged nearly four times as many citations as public administration. This means that comparisons between researchers, journals or institutions across fields will not be meaningful without some form of normalisation.…”

“…Each collection of papers will, therefore, have its own unique reference set and it will be the lists of references from those papers that will be used for normalisation. This approach has obvious advantages -it avoids the use of WoS categories which are ad hoc and outdated Mingers & Leydesdorff, 2014) and it allows for journals that are interdisciplinary and that would therefore be referenced by journals from a range of fields.…”

Evaluating journal quality: A review of journal citation indicators and ranking in business and management

“…Second, SNIP is very close to the impact factors suggesting that the source normalization is not having much effect. This could be because the citation practices within business and management do not differ greatly but there is evidence against this - Mingers and Leydesdorff (2015a), in an analysis of journal cross-citation rates, identified six different sub-fields where the citation rates differed significantly, from a CPP of 32.5 in marketing, IB, strategy and IS, to 11.8 in operational research and operations management. Figure 3 is a plot of PC2 vs PC3.…”

Sub-Disciplines in Management Sciences: Review of Classifications in Polish and Worldwide Research Practice

“…Members of the scientific community continue to debate classification objectives, rules and logic as well as the substantive scope of classifications of sub-disciplines in management sciences (Cyfert et al, 2014;Łupicka, 2014, pp. 70-72;Mingers & Leydesdorff, 2015) leading to the formulation of various practical solutions. Taking this into account, the aim of the paper is the identification and assessment of the scope, characteristics and development prospects of selected classifications of sub-disciplines in management sciences in Polish and worldwide research practice.…”