Structural Influence of Marketing Journals / 123 Journal of Marketing Vol. 67 (April 2003), 123–139 Hans Baumgartner & Rik Pieters The Structural Influence of Marketing Journals: A Citation Analysis of the Discipline and Its Subareas Over Time The authors investigate the overall and subarea influence of a comprehensive set of marketing and marketing- related journals at three points in time during a 30-year period using a citation-based measure of structural influ- ence. The results show that a few journals wield a disproportionate amount of influence in the marketing journal network as a whole and that influential journals tend to derive their influence from many different journals. Differ- ent journals are most influential in different subareas of marketing; general business and managerially oriented journals have lost influence, whereas more specialized marketing journals have gained in influence over time. The Journal of Marketing emerges as the most influential marketing journal in the final period (1996–97) and as the jour- nal with the broadest span of influence across all subareas. Yet the Journal of Marketing is notably influential among applied marketing journals, which themselves are of lesser influence. The index of structural influence is significantly correlated with other objective and subjective measures of influence but least so with the impact fac- tors reported in the Social Sciences Citation Index. Overall, the findings demonstrate the rapid maturation of the marketing discipline and the changing role of key journals in the process. Hans Baumgartner is Professor of Marketing, Smeal College of Business, The Pennsylvania State University. Rik Pieters is Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, Tilburg University. The authors thank Bill Ross and the four anonymous JM reviewers for helpful comments on previous versions of this article. J ournals have become the primary medium to commu- nicate scholarly knowledge in marketing, and the number of marketing-related journals has increased rapidly in recent years. Only a handful of journals covered marketing issues before the 1960s, the foremost being the Harvard Business Review (established in 1920), Journal of Retailing (1925), Journal of Business (1928), and Journal of Marketing (1936). Since then, the number of journals in which research relevant to marketing is published has mush- roomed. Currently, there are 551 journals listed in Cabell’s Directory of Publishing Opportunities in Management and Marketing (Cabell 1997–98). Of these, 59 have the word “marketing” in the title, and an additional 41 cover topics such as advertising, brand management, consumer behavior, consumer policy, purchasing, and retailing. Many other, more general journals frequently contain marketing-related research as well (e.g., Journal of Business Research, Man- agement Science). The rapid growth of the journal market and the prolifer- ation of outlets in which research relevant to marketing is published make it increasingly important to gain insights into the relative influence of marketing-related journals (Doreian 1988; Garfield 1972; Kerin 1996; Singleton 1976). Journal influence affects many important decisions and is of interest to a variety of constituents (Borokhovich et al. 1995; Corrado and Ferris 1997; Fry, Walters, and Scheuermann 1985; Myers, Greyser, and Massy 1979; Tahai and Meyer 1999; Trieschmann et al. 2000). First, researchers, educa- tors, practitioners, and other students of marketing, all with limited time budgets, need to know which journals are most likely to contain useful information based on content and quality criteria. Similarly, university and corporate libraries with limited financial budgets must decide which journals to subscribe to on the basis of patrons’ interest in different pub- lications and journals’ contribution to scholarly discourse and practical impact. Second, authors seeking publishing opportunities want to know which journals are most apt to enhance the visibility and impact of their research. Although the premier journals of a discipline are usually well estab- lished, there is generally less consensus about journals’ influence in particular subareas or niches of the discipline. Third, promotion and tenure decisions in research-oriented universities depend almost exclusively on publications in well-respected journals, and salary levels, author reputation, and the ability to obtain research grants are closely tied to the number of publications in prestigious journals. Journal rankings are particularly important when a scholar’s research is evaluated by people who are not specialists in the discipline and who thus must rely on a journal’s reputation as a proxy for article and research quality. Fourth, rankings of the quality of universities, schools, and academic depart- ments are strongly influenced by evaluations of research productivity, and productivity is usually assessed by publi- cations in a limited set of high-quality journals. Fifth, jour- nal editors want to know about the relative standing of their journals in the discipline and the effects of editorial policies on the journal’s influence. The rapid growth of the journal