The Influence of Marketing Journals

Abstract

An important characteristic of journals is how influential they are in the generation and dissemination of scholarly knowledge in a discipline. We report a citation analysis of 49 marketing and marketing-related journals to assess their relative influence based on the index of structural influence proposed by Salancik (1986). We investigate the level and span of influence of the 49 journals, both in the marketing discipline as a whole and in five specific sub-areas of marketing. As expected, the Journal of Marketing emerges as the most influential journal in the discipline and as the journal with the broadest span of influence across all sub-areas of marketing. However, different journals are most influential in each of the sub-areas, and the Journal of Marketing is particularly influential among the applied marketing journals. We also find that the index of structural influence is significantly correlated with all other measures of influence but least so with the impact factors reported in the Social Sciences Citation Index .