Relationships among the academic business disciplines: a multi-method citation analysis

A great number of papers have been published that compare the quality or impact of academic journals. This article seeks to broaden the debate on journal evaluation by showing how top journals in various academic business disciplines, as defined by the Financial Times list of top research outlets, relate to one other. Using large-scale sociometric analyses on about 140,000 citations we found that the integration of the citation network has increased over time. Moreover, the information flow from Finance and Economics to Management has become stronger and, within Management, a polarization between information generators and users has taken place. We also found that most business academics published in distinct and mostly non-overlapping disciplines. The only exceptions were Finance and Economics as well as Strategic Management and OB/HR. Surprisingly, we also found that the general business journals, which could be assumed to be cited by most other journals across the management disciplines, are not central to the entire field. For instance, they are not complementary at all to Finance and Economics. Instead, Operations Research (OR) and Management Information Systems journals occupy the central space on the perceptual map. This indicates that these disciplines (and OR in particular) are complementary with Management and with Finance and Economics.