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Empirical regularity in academic research productivity patterns in marketing

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  • Talukdar, Debabrata
  • Hariharan, Vijay Ganesh
  • Boo, Chanil

Abstract

In any academic discipline, published articles in their respective journals represent “production units” of scientific knowledge, and bibliometric distributions reflect the patterns in this productivity across authors or “producers”. We use a comprehensive data set from 11 leading marketing journals to examine whether there is any empirical regularity in the patterns of research productivity in the marketing literature. Our results present strong evidence that there is indeed a distinct empirical regularity. It is the so-called generalized Lotka's Law of patterns in scientific productivity: the number of authors publishing n papers is approximately 1/nc of those publishing one paper. We find the empirically estimated value of the exponent c to be 2.05 for the overall bibliometric data across the leading marketing journals. For individual journals, the estimated values of c range from 2.15 to 2.83, with lower values indicating higher authorship concentration levels. We also find that variations in authorship concentration levels across journals and over time are driven by a journal's maturity, its topical focus, its attractiveness as a publication outlet, the characteristics of its review process, and the extent of author collaboration present in the journal. We discuss the general implications of our findings.

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  • Talukdar, Debabrata & Hariharan, Vijay Ganesh & Boo, Chanil, 2011. "Empirical regularity in academic research productivity patterns in marketing," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 28(3), pages 248-257.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ijrema:v:28:y:2011:i:3:p:248-257
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ijresmar.2011.03.003
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    3. Surendra Rajiv & Junhong Chu & Zhiying Jiang, 2015. "Publication, Citation, Career Development, and Recent Trends: Empirical Evidence for Quantitative Marketing Researchers," Customer Needs and Solutions, Springer;Institute for Sustainable Innovation and Growth (iSIG), vol. 2(1), pages 71-90, March.

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