Let the best story win – evaluation of the most cited business history articles

Abstract

Faced with intensifying competition for scientific impact measured in terms of citation counts, small disciplines are challenged to prove their importance as they lack the critical mass to accumulate large numbers of citations. This paper demonstrates that by emphasizing theoretical and methodological rigor even small disciplines such as business history can be competitive. Yet it still appears that readers of business history articles first and foremost seek interesting and useful subject matter, i.e. ‘best’ stories that can be used as background information and as tools in comparisons. However, articles advancing theory and methodology have increasingly gained interest and citations from other business historians as well as from scholars in related disciplines. Thus, business history scholarship using a sound theoretical framework to analyze relevant cases score more citations both inside and outside the field, leading to fruitful debates that serve to enhance the discipline.

Keywords:

• Citations
• impact factor
• bibliometric
• business history
• review

Notes

1. 2015 The WoS Impact Factor for Business History was 0.709 and 0.634 for Business History Review.

2. See, for example, special issues in honor of the late Alfred D. Chandler Jr in Business History Review 2008:2 and Enterprise & Society 2008:3 – see also Enterprise & Society 2009 special issue on interplay between management studies and history research and special issues of Business History on new business histories (2015) and business longevity (2015). For books, see especially Jones and Zeitlin (2007), Amatori and Jones (2003), and Wilson, Toms, de Jong, and Buchnea (2016).

3. SNIP measures actual citations received relative to citations expected for the serial’s subject field. Thus, it corrects the citation practices between different fields. SNIP indices for different journals can be found at https://journalmetrics.scopus.com/ (cited here on 28 April 2017).

4. The Web of Science search yielded a total of 1284 articles citing these 21 articles; however, from the database we compiled, we found only 1056 articles – thus, 16% of cases are missing, as we did not, for example, have access to all the articles or the journals were not included in the WoS at the time. Nevertheless, our sample is large and quite representative of the trends in the field.

5. Among Web of Science Categories, business history journals, for example, are ranked in the category ‘Business; History of Social Sciences,’ whereas economic history journals are included in several categories, namely: ‘Economics; History; History Of Social Sciences,’ ‘Economics; History Of Social Sciences,’ and ‘Economics; history.’ The WoS categories, however, did not appear in the data-set in 2015 – thus, we had to make the categorization manually.

6. The Web of Science counts same reference only once from a single source, even if there are duplicate cites.

7. The total number was calculated as follows: 1488 (number of known citations) × 4 (number of ‘voters’) = 5952. In the case of BH, these figures were: 493 × 4 = 1972, and for BHR: 995 × 4 = 3980.

8. We excluded the most cited articles from the base data in the random sample, as well as those that were not cited at all.

9. The combined total number of citations to articles published in the Journal of Economic History and Economic History Review increased in 2010 to 2016 from 2213 to 2448 (Web of Science, cited in 6 February 2017).

10. This figure includes top-11 articles.

11. Information collected from these databases on 23 November 2016.

12. Social Science Research Network (SSRN, https://www.ssrn.com/en/) and Research Papers in Economics (RePEc, http://repec.org/) in general, and nep-his (http://nep.repec.org/nep-his.html) in particular, are important new avenues for scholars to deliver the most recent business, economic, and financial history working scholarship. Nep-his was, in fact, already created by Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo in 1998.

13. Web of Science, 6 February 2017.

14. aom.org, 6 February 2017.