Are finance, management, and marketing autonomous fields of scientific research? An analysis based on journal citations

Although there is considerable consensus that Finance, Management and Marketing are ‘science’, some debate remains with regard to whether these three areas comprise autonomous, organized and settled scientific fields of research. In this paper we aim to explore this issue by analyzing the occurrence of citations in the top-ranked journals in the areas of Finance, Management, and Marketing. We put forward a modified version of the model of science as a network, proposed by Klamer and Van Dalen (J Econ Methodol 9(2):289–315, 2002), and conclude that Finance is a ‘Relatively autonomous, organized and settled field of research’, whereas Management and (to a larger extent) Marketing are relatively non-autonomous and hybrid fields of research’. Complementary analysis based on sub-discipline rankings using the recursive methodology of Liebowitz and Palmer (J Econ Lit 22:77–88, 1984) confirms the results. In conclusions we briefly discuss the pertinence of Whitley’s (The intellectual and social organization of the sciences, 1984) theory for explaining cultural differences across these sub-disciplines based on its dimensions of scholarly practices, ‘mutual dependency’ and ‘task uncertainty’.