“A Comprehensive Analysis of Marketing Journal Rankings”, by Michelle D. Steward and Bruce R. Lewis, both of Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was the most frequently read article in the Journal of Marketing Education in 2010. The authors have provided additional background to the article:
My colleague, Michelle Steward, and I were very pleased to learn that our paper, “A Comprehensive Analysis of Marketing Journal Rankings,” was the most frequently read article in the Journal of Marketing Education in 2010. In fact, this outcome validates one of the reasons that this stream of research was undertaken, namely that faculty are very interested in these types of journal assessments. We wish to thank Doug Lincoln, the editor of JME, for his insights and guidance during the review process for this article.
The primary motivation for this research was prompted by a conversation with a faculty member who dismissed journal rankings as an improper source for judging journal quality. I was at home grousing about this attitude when my wife (a non-academician) suggested that I should do something about it instead of just complaining, at least to her. After some thought, I came up with the idea of comparing the published rankings to the target journal lists actually used in universities to evaluate faculty research, thereby establishing (or not) the validity of published journal rankings. With support from AACSB, the journal lists from a sample of accredited schools were obtained. Using these data, studies in three areas (Marketing, Operations, and MIS) have shown the published rankings to be valid.
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What would be interesting to do would be to get a panel of marketing practitioners to rank marketing journals by relevance and interest to them as businesspeople. This may well demonstrate to what extent the ‘top’ marketing journals have moved away from relevance and got lost in promoting mathematically elegant and sophisticated papers which are about nothing substantive or of real interest to anyone in business.
Advertising may be more about the sizzle than the sausage but marketing cares about the sausage as well. Can marketing journals be accused of putting style before substance in what they publish?
I agree whith Clive. In addition I suspect that universities use exactly these rankings to draft their target journal lists.