Skip to main content
Log in

A Citation Analysis of Business Ethics Research: A Global Perspective

Journal of Business Ethics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This study provides a global perspective on citations of articles published in ten business ethics journals between 1999 and 2012 and establishes three findings. First, the results indicate that Journal of Business Ethics and Business and Society are the two top business ethics journals based on the distribution of normalized citations received. Second, although North America, particularly the US, remains the top producer of business ethics research, it has been surpassed by Europe in terms of weighted normalized research citations received in 2012, implying a potential diminishing global role of US influence in business ethics research over time. Third, the top-ranked US institutions have reduced their business ethics research impact in recent years, while the European institutions have sharply increased theirs.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. We gratefully acknowledge this suggestion made by a reviewer.

  2. Hirsch (2005) proposes the h-index, which measures the impact of a journal that has at least h citations from its h number of articles in a given year. Harzing and van der Wal (2008) suggest the h-index is a more accurate citation impact measure than the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) journal impact factor. Egghe (2006) suggests the g-index as a modification of the h-index to consider both the over-cited works and overall citation consistency. Specifically, the g-index is derived from all articles of a journal which are “ranked in decreasing order of the number of citations that they received: the g-index is the (unique) largest number such that the top g articles received (together) a total at least g2 citations” [Egghe (2006), p. 131]. Sidiropoulos et al. (2007) propose the hc-index to account for the age of articles that appear in a journal. It places more weight on recently published articles. H-index, g-index, and hc-index approaches examine research quality at the journal level.

  3. The Journal of Accounting, Ethics, and Public Policy included in Serenko and Bonis (2009) ceased publication and the Business and Professional Ethics Journal is not included in this study.

  4. We argue that the coercive citation practice among business ethics journals should not be a problem. Unlike other disciplines with a large number of journals, business ethics has only a small number of journals in which citations tend to concentrate within a few journals. Naturally, authors cite these few business ethics journals more frequently. Editors do not need to specifically require submitting authors to cite their journals as a prerequisite for publication acceptance.

  5. The results using citations that exclude journal self-citations (EJNCs) are not reported here but are available upon request.

  6. We thank a reviewer for pointing out that no business ethics journal appears in the University of Texas-Dallas 24 journals ranking list. Both lists are the important source of information for remuneration, tenure, and promotion at some schools.

  7. Weighted number of articles (WA) is the count of total number of articles using the number of authors as the weights. For instance, Authors A and B publish an article together. Author A is affiliated with Institutions X and Y, while Author B is affiliated with Institution Z. Then, Institutions X, Y, and Z are credited with 0.25, 0.25, and 0.5 WA, respectively.

References

  • Albrecht, C., Thompson, J. A., & Hoopes, J. L. (2011). Productivity and prestige in business ethics research: A report and commentary on the state of the field. Business and Society, 50(4), 580–606.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Albrecht, C., Thompson, J. A., Hoopes, J. L., & Rodrigo, P. (2010). Business ethics journal rankings as perceived by business ethics scholars. Journal of Business Ethics, 95(2), 227–237.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Beets, S. D., Lewis, B. R., & Brower, H. H. (2013). The quality of business ethics journals: An assessment based on application. Business and Society, forthcoming,. doi:10.1177/0007650313478974.

    Google Scholar 

  • Borokhovich, K. A., Bricker, R. J., Brunarski, K. R., & Simkins, B. J. (1995). Finance research productivity and influence. Journal of Finance, 50(5), 1691–1717.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Borokhovich, K. A., & Chung, R. (2000). Financial research: Evidence from recent graduates of doctoral programs. Financial Practice and Education, 10(2), 85–92.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brooker, G., & Shinoda, P. (1976). Peer ratings of graduate programs for business. Journal of Business, 49, 240–251.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chan, K. C., Chang, C. H., & Chang, Y. C. (2013a). Ranking of finance journals: Some Google Scholar citation perspectives. Journal of Empirical Finance, 21, 241–250.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chan, K. C., Chang, C. H., & Chen, C. R. (2011). Financial research in the European region: A long-term assessment (1990–2008). European Financial Management, 17(2), 391–411.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chan, K. C., Chen, C. R., & Lung, P. (2007). One-and-a-half decades of global research output in finance: 1990–2004. Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, 28(4), 417–439.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chan, K. C., Chen, C. R., & Steiner, T. L. (2002). Production in the finance literature, institutional reputation, and labor mobility in academia: A global perspective. Financial Management, 31(1), 131–156.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chan, K. C., & Fok, R. (2003). Membership on editorial boards and finance department rankings. Journal of Financial Research, 26(2), 405–420.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chan, K. C., Fung, H., & Yau, J. (2010). Business ethics research: A global perspectives. Journal of Business Ethics, 95(1), 39–53.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chan, K. C., Fung, H.-G., & Yau, J. (2013b). Predominant sources and contributors of influential business ethics research: Evidence and implications from a threshold citation analysis. Business Ethics: A European Review, 22(3), 263–276.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Choi, C. J., Kim, S. W., & Kim, J. B. (2010). Globalizing business ethics research and the ethical need to include the bottom-of-the-pyramid countries: Redefining the global triad as business systems and institutions. Journal of Business Ethics, 94(2), 299–306.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chow, C. W., Hadddad, K., Singh, G., & Wu, A. (2007). On using journal rank to proxy for an article’s contribution or value. Issues in Accounting Education, 22, 411–427.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Corley, K. G., & Gioia, D. A. (2011). Building theory about theory building: What constitutes a theoretical contribution. Academy of Management Review, 36(1), 12–32.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Currie, R. R., & Pandher, G. S. (2011). Finance journal rankings and tiers: An active scholar assessment methodology. Journal of Banking & Finance, 35(1), 7–20.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davis, M. S. (1971). That’s interesting: Towards a phenomenology of sociology and a sociology of phenomenology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 1, 309–344.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Egghe, L. (2006). Theory and practise of the g-index. Scientometrics, 69(1), 131–152.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Freeman, R. B. & Huang, W. (2014). Collaborating with people like me: Ethnic co-authorship within the US, NBER Working Paper 19905, http://www.nber.org/papers/w19905.

  • Garfield, E. (1973). Citation frequency as a measure of research activity and performance. Essays of an Information Scientist, 1, 406–408.

    Google Scholar 

  • Glaser, B., & Strauss, A. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory. New York: Aldine Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harzing, A.-W., & van der Wal, R. (2008). A google scholar h-index for journals: A better metric to measure journal impact in economics and business? In Proceedings of the Academy of Management Annual Meeting.

  • Hirsch, J. E. (2005). An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103 (46), 16569–16572.

  • Holland, D., & Albrecht, C. (2013). The worldwide academic field of business ethics: Scholars’ perceptions of the most important issues. Journal of Business Ethics, 117(4), 777–788.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kaufman, G. (1984). Rankings of finance departments by faculty representation on editorial boards of professional journals: A note. Journal of Finance, 39(5), 1189–1197.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Klemkosky, R. C., & Tuttle, D. L. (1977). A ranking of doctoral programs by financial research contributions of graduates. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 12(2), 491–497.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Meho, L. I., & Yang, Y. (2007). Impact of data sources on citation counts and rankings of LIS faculty: Web of Science vs. Scopus and Google Scholar. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58, 2105–2125.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Serenko, A., & Bonis, N. (2009). A citation-based ranking of the business ethics scholarly journals. International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, 4(4), 390–399.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sidiropoulos, A., Katsaros, D., & Manolopoulos, Y. (2007). Generalized h-index for disclosing latent facts in citation networks. Scientometrics, 72(2), 253–280.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Singh, G., Haddad, K., & Chow, C. W. (2007). Are articles in “top” management journals necessarily of higher quality? Journal of Management Inquiry, 16(4), 319–331.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, S. D. (2004). Is an article in a top journal a top article? Financial Management, 33, 133–149.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilhite, A. W., & Fong, F. A. (2012). Coercive citation in academic publishing. Science, 335(6068), 542–543. doi:10.1126/science.1212540.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Xu, N., Poon, W., & Chan, K. C. (2014). Contributing institutions and authors in international business research: A quality-based assessment. Management International Review, 54, 735–755.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Xu, N., Chan, K. C., & Chang, C.-H. (2015). A quality-based global assessment of financial research.  Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting. doi:10.1007/s11156-014-0480-2.

Download references

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the helpful comments from two anonymous reviewers. The usual caveats apply.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kam C. Chan.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Chan, K.C., Fung, A., Fung, HG. et al. A Citation Analysis of Business Ethics Research: A Global Perspective. J Bus Ethics 136, 557–573 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2533-9

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2533-9

Keywords

Navigation