3515 Citation Benchmarks for Articles Published by Australian Marketing Academics Geoffrey N. Soutar, University of Western Australia Abstract Research quality is becoming increasingly important in the Australian university system and journal quality and citation rates are both seen as reasonable quality indicators. The present study used the citations received by articles published in a set of high and reasonable quality marketing journals in 2001, which is the first year of the intended Australian RQF exercise, to develop influence benchmarks. The analysis suggested a high quality benchmark of 16 citations and a reasonable quality benchmark of 6 citations. The “influence” of a sample of Australian marketing scholars’ recent publications was examined by comparing their citations with these benchmarks. Marketing scholars have produced a number of very influential papers in the past six years and the scholars who have published such articles can be found across a range of Australia’s universities. Introduction The introduction of research quality frameworks (RQFs) in the education sectors in a number of countries (e.g. New Zealand) has seen an increased interest in issues of research quality. Australia is no exception to this trend as the Federal Government will undertake an initial evaluation of the quality of the research produced by the country’s universities in 2008, including research produced by marketing academics. The Australian RQF process requires universities to define research active staff and to provide four “pieces” of research output produced from 2001 to 2006 for each of these academics to enable the evaluation to be made. While the Labor Opposition has indicated that it may not use the same approach, there is little doubt that some type of quality evaluation will be undertaken in the near future, even if there was a change of government. What is also clear is that however the evaluations are made, they will be influenced by the quality of the publication outlets (e.g. journals and publishers) and the influence the research outputs have had, as measured by the number of times they have been cited. The former issue (journal quality) has long been a concern to business academics and has been examined by a number of people in recent years; in particular by a number of Australian- based business academics (e.g. Sullivan Mort et al., 2005; Soutar et al., 2005; Polonsky et al., 1999). Some universities (e.g. the University of Queensland and the University of Melbourne) have even developed internal “quality lists” with a ranking system to provide guidance to staff members. From this activity, a number of “very high quality” marketing journals, which are shown in alphabetical order in Table 1, has emerged that most academics in the field would accept as reasonable. It seems likely Australian academics who have published in such journals will be seen as producing “quality” work. However, the issue of whether Australian business- related research has been influential, whether published in such journals or in other outlets, needs further investigation and the present paper was undertaken to examine this issue. In particular, evaluators might ask what the citation rates are for papers published in the “very