Contributing Institutions and Authors in International Business Research: A Quality-Based Assessment

We use a quality-based approach to assess contributing institutions and authors in international business (IB) research. Specifically, we use Google Scholar citations of individual articles to weigh the number of IB research articles in core IB and other non-IB elite journals. Our approach mitigates concerns about the quality difference among articles across different journals and within individual journals. We find evidence to suggest that IB research in the European and Asia-Pacific regions exhibits an upward trend over the 1995–2011 period. With respect to institutional research quality, we document that an IB program with faculty members working with their peers in foreign countries and the presence of a doctoral program can enhance an institution’s research quality. Prolific authors are very mobile and typically have global experience.     

Impact of open access on citation of scholarly publications in the field of civil engineering

The development of science is accompanied by growth of scholarly publications, primarily in the form of articles in peer-reviewed journals. Scientific work is often evaluated through the number of scientific publications in international journals and their citations. This article discusses the impact of open access (OA) on the number of citations for an institution from the field of civil engineering. We analyzed articles, published in 2007 in 14 international journals with impact factor, which are included in the Journal Citation Reports subject category “Civil Engineering”. The influence of open access on the number of citations was analyzed. The aim of our research was to determine if open access articles from the field of civil engineering receive more citations than non-open access articles. Based on the value of impact factor and ranking in quartiles, we also looked at the influence of the rank of journals on the number of citations, separately for OA and Non OA articles, in databases Web of Science (WOS), Scopus and Google Scholar. For 2,026 studied articles we found out that 22 % of them were published as OA articles. They received 29 % of all citations in the observed period. We can conclude by the significance level 5 % or less that in the databases WOS and Scopus the articles from top ranked journals (first quartile) achieved more citations than Non OA articles. This argument can be confirmed for some other journals from second quartile as well, while for the journals ranked into the third quartile it can’t be confirmed. This could be confirmed only partly for journals from the second quartile, and would not be confirmed for journals ranked into the third quartile. This shows that open access is not a sufficient condition for citation, but increases the number of citations for articles published in journals with high impact.     

China’s research in chemical engineering journals in Science Citation Index Expanded: a bibliometric analysis

This study was designed to evaluate China’s scientific output of chemical engineering in Science Citation Index Expanded in the Web of Science from 1992 to 2011. The document type, language, trend and collaboration patterns were analyzed, as well as the output of different journals. Distributions of article titles and abstracts, author keywords, KeyWords Plus of different periods, and the most cited articles were studied to figure out the research focuses and trends. Chinese Journal of Catalysis, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, and Chinese Journal of Chemical Engineering published most of Chinese articles in the area of chemical engineering. The Chemical Engineering Department of Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, Tianjin University, and East China University of Science and Technology were the top four institutions that published most articles in China. This study showed that adsorption, photocatalysis and synthesis have been the hot points of research in the past two decades, while ionic liquid tends to be the new area of special interest in future. Pseudo-second order model for sorption processes is getting more and more popular with great influence since its publication. In addition, the ratio of institutional independent articles: nationally collaborative articles: internationally collaborative articles has been developed to compare different institutions’ publication characteristics.     

The evolution of the international business field: a scientometric investigation of articles published in its premier journal

Macro-environmental trends such as technological changes, declining trade and investment barriers, and globalizing forces impacting both markets and production worldwide point to the heightened importance of international business (IB) and the relevance of IB research today. Despite this, a leading scholar has expressed concerns that the IB research agenda could be ‘running out of steam’ (Buckley, Journal of International Business Studies 33(2):365–373, 2002), prompting on-going introspection within the IB field. We contribute to this debate by investigating the evolution of the IB field through a scientometric examination of articles published in its premier journal, the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) from 1970 until 2008. We introduce a new analytical tool, Leximancer, to the fields of international business and scientometry. We show an evolution from an initial and extended emphasis on macro-environmental issues to a more recent focus on micro-economic, firm-level ones with the multinational enterprise (MNE) as an organizational form enduring throughout the entire period. We observe a field that has established a justifiable claim for relevance, participating actively in the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas.     

Bibliometric study of Electronic Commerce Research in Information Systems &; MIS Journals

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the contributions of the Information Systems &; MIS articles in the electronic commerce literature. To achieve this, the papers published in the ten top journals are reviewed. This bibliometric study examines the extant literature on Information Systems &; MIS and international business. We examine a sample of 853 articles published in ten leading management/business journals during the 23 year period from 1991 to 2014. The results provide a global perspective of the field, identifying the works that have had the greatest impact, the intellectual interconnections among authors and published papers, and the main research traditions or themes that have been explored in Information Systems &; MIS studies. Structural and longitudinal analyses reveal changes in the intellectual structure of the field over time. The paper concludes with a discussion of the accumulated knowledge and suggestions for avenues of future research.     

Søren Bisgaard’s contributions to Quality Engineering: Design of experiments

Abstract

This article examines Søren’s impact on the design and analysis of experiment through three of his published articles in ASQ journals. These articles demonstrate Søren’s unique blend of engineer and statistician with the ability to see the big picture both of the solution to the specific problem and of the solution strategy for good practice. Søren was a giant in our field who was struck down too early in life by mesothelioma at the age of 58 years. His work, and more importantly his impact on his colleagues, has continued to influence the profession.     

Quantitative analysis of Spanish university scientific output in the area of Legal and Forensic Medicine: International exposure

We set out to analyse and quantify the papers published (for an international readership) by Spanish universities in the field of Legal and Forensic Medicine. For this, we used the MEDLINE data base, to analyse research articles in which a Spanish university teacher (whose sole employment was with a university, as registered by the Ministry of Education in July 2005, (n = 67), appeared as author or co-author in this field. The years covered are 1952 (First year that a Spanish author appears for an article on Legal and Forensic Medicine in this service) to July 2005. A total of 770 articles were counted; the productivity in this area was increasing substantially from the 1980’s onwards. English language scientific journals were the preferred channel of communication. Slightly more than 85% of the works can be classified into four themes, of which Genetics is the most prolific. The number of papers published in English journals represented 84% of the total and only 13% was published in Spanish journals. There was a close relationship between growth in the authority index and inter-institutional co-operation, which boosted the production of articles. When at least one of the authorship of a published paper was a Spanish university teacher, the research was led by a university in 62.4% of cases, and of this 85.6% were Spanish universities.     

Experience,Equity and Foreign Investment Risk: A PIC Perspective

We analyze foreign investment risk-mitigating effects of host-country policy stability, firm experience and equity stakes using an empirical context largely ignored by international business (IB) research: project investment companies (PICs). PICs permit cleaner separation of individual investment project risk from the parent firm, which may otherwise pool risk characteristics from managing multiple projects across different industries and countries. PICs also permit potentially unbiased, prospective risk assessment at the time of a project’s initial announcement based on the mix of debt and equity funding the project. Consistent with previous IB research, our analyses of 396 PICs announced in 53 countries from 1990–2006 indicate that investment risk measured as the percentage of equity-to-total capital funding a PIC decreases with greater host-country policy stability, lead-investor experience in the host country, and lead-investor equity stakes. But contrary to previous IB research, we find that lead-sponsor experience and equity stakes reduce investment risk less as host-country policy stability decreases. From a PIC perspective, investor experience and equity stakes are complements to (not substitutes for) host-country policy stability. Our PIC-based evidence re-invigorates research and related practice and policy debates about how investor experience and equity holdings affect foreign project decisions and suggests new avenues for future work.     

Publication activity in complementary and alternative medicine

In this article we analyse how research on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) break through into one established scientific arena, namely academic journals. With help from bibliometric methods we analyse publication of CAM articles, in the Medline database, during the period 1966–2007. We also analyse the general content of the articles and in what journals they get published. We conclude that the publication activity of CAM articles increases rapidly, especially in the late 1990s, and that the changing growth rate is not due to the general expansion of Medline. The character of CAM articles has changed towards more clinical oriented research, especially in subfields such as acupuncture and musculoskeletal manipulations. CAM articles are found both in core clinical journals and in specialized CAM journals. Even though a substantial part of the articles are published in CAM journals, we conclude that the increasing publication activity is not restricted to the expansion of these specialized journals.     

The economic lot scheduling problem: a content analysis

The paper at hand addresses the Economic Lot Scheduling Problem (ELSP), which is concerned with finding a feasible and cost-minimal production schedule for multiple items produced in lots on a single machine. The ELSP started to attract the attention of researchers in the 1950s, where the focus was primarily on the development of simple heuristics for solving the problem. Over the subsequent decades, this topic has frequently been addressed in the literature, with the subject of research being the development of new scheduling policies or solution procedures or extensions of the scope of the original model. To date, a large number of journal articles has been published on the ELSP and its model variants. To identify key research themes, publication patterns and opportunities for future research, the paper at hand applies a content analysis to a sample of 242 papers published on the Economic Lot Scheduling Problem. The results of the content analysis indicate that prior research on this topic had a strong focus on the development of solution methodologies, and that several aspects that are directly connected to lot sizing and scheduling have not attracted much attention in research on the ELSP yet, such as, for example, energy cost and sustainability.     

Understanding the impact change of a highly cited article: a content-based citation analysis

Researchers tend to cite highly cited articles, but how these highly cited articles influence the citing articles has been underexplored. This paper investigates how one highly cited essay, Hirsch’s “h-index” article (H-article) published in 2005, has been cited by other articles. Content-based citation analysis is applied to trace the dynamics of the article’s impact changes from 2006 to 2014. The findings confirm that citation context captures the changing impact of the H-article over time in several ways. In the first two years, average citation mention of H-article increased, yet continued to decline with fluctuation until 2014. In contrast with citation mention, average citation count stayed the same. The distribution of citation location over time also indicates three phases of the H-article “Discussion,” “Reputation,” and “Adoption” we propose in this study. Based on their locations in the citing articles and their roles in different periods, topics of citation context shifted gradually when an increasing number of other articles were co-mentioned with the H-article in the same sentences. These outcomes show that the impact of the H-article manifests in various ways within the content of these citing articles that continued to shift in nine years, data that is not captured by traditional means of citation analysis that do not weigh citation impacts over time.     

Research trends in gender differences in higher education and science: a co-word analysis

The aim of this study is to map and analyze the structure and evolution of the scientific literature on gender differences in higher education and science, focusing on factors related to differences between 1991 and 2012. Co-word analysis was applied to identify the main concepts addressed in this research field. Hierarchical cluster analysis was used to cluster the keywords and a strategic diagram was created to analyze trends. The data set comprised a corpus containing 652 articles and reviews published between 1991 and 2012, extracted from the Thomson Reuters Web of Science database. In order to see how the results changed over time, documents were grouped into three different periods: 1991–2001, 2002–2007, and 2008–2012. The results showed that the number of themes has increased significantly over the years and that gender differences in higher education and science have been considered by specific research disciplines, suggesting important research-field-specific variations. Overall, the study helps to identify the major research topics in this domain, as well as highlighting issues to be addressed or strengthened in further work.     

Bibliometric study of family business succession between 1939 and 2017: mapping and analyzing authors’ networks

This study maps and analyzes the scientific research networks of family business succession. We examine coauthors’ activities in terms of not only productivity but also their importance to the coauthorship network. The most influential contributors and universities, as well as their research networks and theoretical underpinnings, are discussed. The review examines 661 articles published by 1105 authors in 224 academic journals indexed in the Social Science Citation Index and Scopus between 1939 and 2017. We used a bibliometric approach based on coauthorship analysis to measure cooperation. The results show that family business succession research is characterized by high fragmentation in the authors’ collaboration in general, but the leading scholars are strongly interconnected. We map and analyze the most influential networks by identifying the most important topics studied, the theoretical and methodological approaches employed, the scope of the research conducted, and where it has been published. Most of the identified networks are in North America and Europe, and most are not theoretically or methodologically specialized.     

Academic inbreeding and research productivity and impact in Australian law schools

This study compares the research productivity and impact of inbred and non-inbred faculty employed at Australian law schools. The sample consists of 429 academics, employed at 21 law schools. To measure research productivity and impact we use articles published in top law journals, defined in six different ways, as well as total citations and two different citation indices. We report results including, and excluding, publications in the academic’s home law review. We find evidence that silver-corded faculty outperform other faculty on one of the measures of publications in top journals, once the endogeneity of academic seniority, grant history and the status of the law school at which the individual is employed is addressed, but this finding is not robust across alternative measures of articles published in the top journals. We find that there is no statistically significant difference between the research productivity and impact of inbred and non-inbred faculty. This finding is robust to a range of different ways of measuring research productivity and impact and alternative econometric approaches, including using two-stage least squares to address the endogeneity of academic seniority, grant history and the status of the law school at which the legal academic is employed.     

Characteristics of the research on reverse logistics (1995–2005)

This paper aims to describe and analyse the main characteristics of articles on reverse logistics published in the production and operations management field, in order to determine the evolution of this current research over recent years and improve our understanding of this issue. We built up a database with the articles on reverse logistics published in the most relevant journals within the period 1995–2005, and we have explored the topic, the methodology and the techniques of analysis, as well as other relevant aspects of the research. We have evaluated the first decade of research on reverse logistics, observing what has been done and how, where and by whom it has been carried out. The result is an extensive review of the research works that have created and developed the reverse logistics concept, outlining some directions of research for the near future and offering practical help to those who begin to research on this topic.     

National research contributions: A case study on Finnish biomedical research

The long-term influence and contribution of research can be evaluated relatively reliably by bibliometric citation analysis. Previously, productivity of nations has been estimated by using either the number of published articles or journal impact factors and/or citation data. These studies show certain trends, but detailed analysis is not possible due to the assumption that all articles in a journal were equally cited. Here we describe the first comprehensive, longterm, nationwide analysis of scientific performance. We studied the lifetime research output of 748 Finnish principal investigators in biomedicine during the years 1966–2000, analysed national trends, and made a comparison with international research production. Our results indicate that analyses of the scientific contribution of persons, disciplines, or nations should be based on actual publication and citation counts rather than on derived information like impact factors. 51% of the principal investigators have published altogether 75% of the articles; however, the whole scientific community has contributed to the growth of biomedical research in Finland since the Second World War.     

Environmental sciences research in northern Australia, 2000–2011: a bibliometric analysis within the context of a national research assessment exercise

This paper reports on a bibliometric analysis of environmental sciences research in northern Australia between 2000 and 2011. It draws on publications data for Charles Darwin University (CDU) and James Cook University (JCU) researchers to present a bibliometric profile of the journals in which they publish, the citations to their research outputs, and the key research topics discussed in the publications. Framing this analysis, the study explored the relationship between the two universities’ publications and their ‘fit’ with the environmental sciences field as defined by the Australian research assessment model, Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA). The Scopus database retrieved more records than Web of Science, although only minor differences were seen in the journals in which researchers published most frequently and the most highly cited articles. Strong growth in publications is evident in the 12 year period, but the journals in which the researchers publish most frequently differ from the journals in which the most highly cited articles are published. Many of the articles by CDU and JCU affiliated researchers are published in journals outside of the environmental sciences category as defined by Scopus and Web of Science categories and the ERA, however, the research conducted at each university aligns closely with that institution’s research priorities.     

Bibliographic coupling,common abstract stems and clustering: A comparison of two document-document similarity approaches in the context of science mapping

This paper deals with two document-document similarity approaches in the context of science mapping: bibliographic coupling and a text approach based on the number of common abstract stems. We used 43 articles, published in the journal Information Retrieval, as test articles. An information retrieval expert performed a classification of these articles. We used the cosine measure for normalization, and the complete linkage method was used for clustering the articles. A number of articles pairs were ranked (1) according to descending normalized coupling strength, and (2) according to descending normalized frequency of common abstract stems. The degree of agreement between the two obtained rankings was low, as measured by Kendall’s tau. The agreement between the two cluster solutions, one for each approach, was fairly low, according to the adjusted Rand index. However, there were examples of perfect agreement between the coupling solution and the stems solution. The classification generated by the expert contained larger groups compared to the coupling and stems solutions, and the agreement between the two solutions and the classification was not high. According to the adjusted Rand index, though, the stems solution was a better approximation of the classification than the coupling solution. With respect to cluster quality, the overall Silhouette value was slightly higher for the stems solution. Examples of homogeneous cluster structures, as well as negative Silhouette values, were found with regard to both solutions. The expert classification indicates that the field of information retrieval, as represented by one volume of articles published in Information Retrieval, is fairly heterogeneous regarding research themes, since the classification is associated with 15 themes. The complete linkage method, in combination with the upper tail rule, gave rise to a fairly good approximation of the classification with respect to the number of identified groups, especially in case of the stems approach.