Forty years of European Management Journal: A bibliometric overview

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Abstract

The European Management Journal (EMJ) is a renowned peer-reviewed journal of international reputation in the fields of business and management research since 1982. EMJ publishes original and high-quality conceptual, empirical, and review research papers that contribute to the advancement of the body of knowledge and its application in the field. Until the time of this overview, 2164 papers (including 2004 articles, 96 editorials, 28 conference papers, 27 notes, and 3 short surveys) have been published in the journal between 1982 and 2020. We analyzed all these articles using bibliometric techniques to examine the impact of the journal’s publications, most productive and influential authors, and their contributions in the field of business and management research. Co-authorship among the top authors, co-occurrences of the topics, co-citations of the journals, bibliographic coupling of the authors, affiliating institutes, and countries were analyzed by applying network analysis techniques using VOSviewer software. The advancement of research in the field of management during the last decade is also critically discussed in order to understand recent developments in the field of business and management research.

Introduction

The European Management Journal (EMJ) is one of the premier research journals that publishes novel, high-quality research in the fields of business and management. During its 40 years “EMJ has developed a coherent identity as one of the world’s top management journals – being an innovative, method-agnostic, and forward-looking quality journal” (Kastanakis, 2021) and is well positioned for a bright future. Research on strategic management, organizational theory, human resource management, innovation and entrepreneurship, marketing management, knowledge management, leadership and change management, supply chain management, and accounting feature frequently in EMJ. EMJ receives more than 1000 submissions per year, out of which approximately 70% are desk-rejected while around 8% of papers are finally accepted for publication at EMJ. This acceptance rate shows that only high-quality and original papers are published in EMJ after filtering them through a stringent blind review process. With proven track record of quality publications in the field of business and management, EMJ has been indexed in the Association of Business Schools (ABS)’s academic journal guide (AJG), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and Australian Business Dean’s Council (ABDC) ranking lists as well as in all other major lists. Prof. Sarah Robinson of University of Glasgow and Prof. Minas Kastanakis of ESCP Business School, London are the present serving Editor-in-Chief and Co-Editor of the journal, respectively. EMJ is listed in Q1 quartile and ranked 39 over 427 journals in the field of strategy and management research by Scimago. Moreover, it has 90% ranking percentile in the field of strategy and management research. It is indexed and abstracted in most of the popular databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. The present CiteScore and impact factor of EMJ are 6.3 and 2.37, respectively, for the year 2019 (Clarivate Analytics, 2020). This means that the EMJ articles of 2017 and 2018 years received an average of 2.37 citations in 2019. Both the 2-year and 5-year journal impact factors of EMJ have improved tremendously in the last 10 years (see Fig. 1). For instance, the 2-year impact factor of EMJ has improved to 2.369 for 2019 from 0.795 in 2011 with 22% annual growth rate. Similarly, the 5-year impact factor of EMJ has reached to 4.65 presently from 2.797 in 2011 and is trending up. The journal has received an h-index of 99 by Scimago, which indicates that 99 of 2158 EMJ articles receive at least 99 citations each. In fact, the present h-index of EMJ is 106.

Bibliometric analysis provides meaningful insights of already published scientific research works (Ahmad et al., 2020). This technique is used widely by most of the studies that provide retrospective overview of a journal. For example, Donthu, N., Kumar, S,& Pattnaik, D., (2020) provided a bibliographic overview of 45 years of Journal of Business Research. Martínez-López, F. J., Merigó, J. M., Valenzuela-Fernández, L., & Nicolás, C., (2018) presented bibliometric overview for 50 years of the European Journal of Marketing; Merigó, J. M., Miranda, J., Modak, N. M., Boustras, G., & de la Sotta, C., (2019) provided a bibliographic overview of 40 years of Safety Science. Donthu et al., 2020, Donthu et al., 2020 summarized the retrospective evaluation of Marketing Intelligence and Planning. Merigó, J. M., Cobo, M. J., Laengle, S., Rivas, D., & Herrera-Viedma, E., (2019) presented bibliographic overview of 20 years of Soft Computing. Donthu, N., Kumar, S., Pandey, N., & Gupta, P. (2021) summarized the bibliographic overview of 40 years of the International Journal of Information Management. Donthu, N., Reinartz, W., Kumar, S., & Pattnaik, D. (2021) provided a retrospective review of the first 35 years of the International Journal of Research in Marketing.

We provide a comprehensive bibliographic overview of EMJ between 1982 and 2020, including the total publication and citations trend, the most prolific EMJ authors, the most influential EMJ articles, the most influential affiliations of EMJ authors, the most productive countries of EMJ authors, the journals most frequently citing EMJ articles, the journals most frequently cited in EMJ articles using bibliographic authors coupling, co-citation analysis, and bibliographic documents coupling techniques. The mostly discussed topics in EMJ are identified using co-occurrence analysis. We also discussed the major areas of management research covered in EMJ through clustering them into nine categories. Bibliographic overview of the research journey of EMJ in the last 5 years (2016–2020) is also presented for understanding recent developments in management research published in EMJ.

Section snippets

Bibliometric method and data

Bibliometric analysis, a citation-based research approach, has gained interest among most researchers and editors of research journals in recent times because of its application in gaining meaningful insights on the impact of research works and the journals based on the citations received by the research works published in respective journals during a specific period of time. Researchers apply this technique on a large set of bibliographic documents (Broadus, 1987; Pritchard, 1969) to determine

Publications trend and citations structure of EMJ

The EMJ started its publication journey in 1982 with 22 documents initially, which gradually reached to 2158 TP by the end of 2020 that records 55.33 average publications per year (see Table 1). Highest number of articles were published in the years 2020 (114), 2014 (88), and 2017 (78). However, the highest number of citations were received for the papers published in 2005 (3930), 2008 (3870), and 2000 (3254). Of the total 2158 articles, 1795 articles received at least one citation, and they

Summary and conclusions

The EMJ publishes only original, and high-quality impactful research related to all major fields of management theory and practice. During the 40 years of its publishing journey, EMJ has published 2164 documents between 1982 and 2020 with an average of 55 documents per annum. In terms of total publications, 2020 is the most productive year with 114 publications followed by 2014 with 88 publications and 2017 with 78 publications. In terms of total citations, 2005 was the most influential year

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