In Search of Diversity: The Record of Major Marketing Journals, from the Journal of Marketing Research {February 1999}.
The title of this article is: In Search of Diversity: The Record of Major Marketing Journals, from the Journal of Marketing Research {February 1999}. The article described how three authors analyze the publications of four Marketing journals, and how they relate to each other against their mission statement.
According to the article, a study analyzes the publications of four major marketing journals on the way they relate to each other based on their mission statement. One finding that these authors found out was that the Journals that claim to be diverse, failed to be as diverse as their mission states, and other journals that make no claims on diversity tend to be very diversified. Another finding is that the journals tend to stay stable with time even if the editors of the journals try to change their ways.
The article starts by saying that there is many articles in journals that are descriptive research, and that they have touched many aspects of researching different articles that are being published, but one thing that these descriptive papers have not done , is to address diversity. What the authors want to know is how diverse are the journal publications. Moreover, how the level of diversity configures with the mission statement of each journal. They also wanted to know how diversity of each journal compares with each other. The authors argue how diversity is very important in academic publishing. They define diversity in which the journal is open to publishings in a variety of topics. The article reports on three studies they used to test out how diverse were the journals.
The authors first focussed on four journals that represent the concept of major marketing journals. The journals that were chosen were Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing. Journal of Marketing Research , and marketing Science. Then the authors formulated a way to randomly select a sample of each of the published articles of each journal. After carefully selecting the articles they started on the first study which was on how the journals used works cited in a diverse way, such as who they cited most and how broad were the subjects cited. In the second study, the article reviews the concentration of the context in its citations. They discovered that three of the journals become less diversified over time. The third study was on the consistency of subjects throughout a thirty-year period. They discovered the consistency in the trends of the journals, such as in the early 80’s the use lab experiments was going up from 36% in 1980-1981 to 58% in 1990. So the article clearly explains the mathematical logic between the trends used by each other over a period of time.
The article discusses the important finding, in which they discover that Journal of Consumer research which states to be diverse does not seem to be as diversified as they want to be. The journal of Marketing Research which claims to be very logical in one method actually appears to be very diverse.
In conclusion, the article discusses how it discovered that despite the similarities in these journals, they seem to be evolving into being very different form each other. By using different methods to gather research; such as one using field data, instead of lab data others using verbal logic over mathematical logic. The author also discusses what the editor should do to further enhance its journal to be more diversified.
