Productivity and impact in advertising research since the millennium: a profiling and investigation of drivers of impact

Abstract

What does it take to become a top advertising scholar in productivity? What drives impact in advertising research? This article sets out to answer these two questions by assessing the productivity and impact among scholars and their work in advertising since the millennium. As a two-part study, we begin by benchmarking and profiling the top 1% scholars in the field based on their research publications in the three top advertising journals (Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, and International Journal of Advertising). Next, we employ a three-perspective conceptual model to identify the salient drivers of impact in advertising research. By content analyzing 1443 articles in the three journals published between 2000 and 2014, we show that certain universalistic and particularistic factors (to a lesser extent) significantly predict paper citations. Our findings reveal how advertising academia is advancing and showing signs of internationalization in the new millennium, which provides implications for the field's advancement and scholarship.

Keywords:

• international advertising research
• research impact
• citations
• advertising trends
• citation analysis

Acknowledgements

We thank IJA Chief Editor Professor Charles R. Taylor, Special Issue Editor, and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on this manuscript. We would also like to thank Mr Xu Xin for his research assistance on this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We checked the citation counts of all non-full-length publications including editorial notes, special issue introductions, commentaries, and short research notes, and found that they have much lower citations than a typical full-length research paper. However, there is one exception, Taylor's (2005) paper, entitled ‘Moving International Advertising Research Forward: A New Research Agenda’. It received 3.5 times more citations than a typical full-length paper (which obtain an average of 42.6 citations). Thus, we decided to include this paper in our analysis. This addition does not affect the number of top scholars and other results in our study.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is partially supported by the GRF Grant [#12501114], Hong Kong Research Grant Council, awarded to one of the authors.

Notes on contributors

Terri H. Chan

Terri H. Chan (Ph.D., The University of Hong Kong) is a research assistant professor of the Department of Communication Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong. Her research interests include branding, advertising effects, social media, and communication engagement. Her works have appeared in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, and the International Journal of Electronic Commerce Studies.

Caleb H. Tse

Caleb H. Tse (Ph.D., The University of Hong Kong) is an assistant professor of marketing at the Graduate School of Business, Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, Korea. His research focuses on emerging markets in specific areas such as firm innovation, marketing strategy, and advertising strategy. His works have appeared in Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, and Journal of Management.

Kineta Hung

Kineta Hung (Ph.D., York University) is a professor and head of the Department of Communication Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong. Her research interests include celebrity endorsement, managing national images, communication engagement, and advertising in China. Her works have appeared in Journal of Marketing, Journal of Advertising, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Retailing, and Journal of International Marketing.