The Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing Comes of Age: Some Postscripts

ABSTRACT

Every scholarly journal has a mandatory responsibility to carry out an internal, introspective meta-analysis of its intellectual stock and its emergent legacy, to take stock of where it has been and provide a blueprint for where it is headed. Most researchers will admit that such retrospective reviews are extremely important in a number of ways and mark a critical rite of passage for any journal. So when Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing (JBBM), the premier scholarly journal dedicated to the content area of business-to-business (B2B) field decided to develop such an article, it heralded its coming of age and joined the ranks of other scholarly marketing journals that similarly signaled their entry into sustainable mature phase of their life cycles by publishing such retrospectives. Unlike other retrospectives, however, the retrospective being published in this issue of JBBM is special in that it is coauthored by the journal's founding editor, David T. Wilson (1991–1995) and his successor and the current editor, J. David Lichtenthal (1995–current). In other words, between the two of them the review subsumes the entire institutional history and memory associated with the journal. And it shows. The objective of this commentary is to present some additional postscript tables associated with the content of the fourteen-year publishing history of JBBM to accompany the article by Lichtenthal, Mummalaneni, and Wilson (2008).

KEYWORDS:

• Business marketing
• business-to-business marketing
• B2B research
• industrial marketing
• B2B education