Abstract
After almost 30 years of publications, Journal of Business Ethics (JBE) has achieved the position of main marketplace for business ethics discussion and knowledge generation. Given the large amount of knowledge produced, an assessment of the state of the art could benefit both the constructive development of the discipline and the further growth of the journal itself. As the evolution of a discipline is set to be reflected in the evolution of its leading journal, we attempt to characterize changes in the intellectual structure of business ethics through a bibliometric analysis of articles published in JBE. Specifically, we conduct a knowledge-stock analysis to assess the evolution, major trends, and current state of the journal. Additionally, we use citation and co-citation analysis to provide an accurate description of the content and the advancement of research in business ethics. Through the results of our analysis, we are able to: (1) pinpoint the characteristics of the growing stock of knowledge published by JBE over the years; (2) identify the most influential works on business ethics research; and (3) detect the formation and evolution of schools of thought in business ethics.
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Notes
In the first two eras, JBE articles were gathered in a single volume each year; however the increasing number of articles and issues eventually led the editorial board to decide to publish several volumes per year. The irregular growth of the number of volumes, coupled with the constant increase of the number of issues makes the first part of Table 2 difficult to read; therefore, the next paragraph will be based on the second and third parts of the table.
For each work in the table, the raw citation frequency indicates the number of JBE’s articles citing the work (we do not account for multiple citations within the same JBE’s article). The relative citation frequency indicates the percentage of JBE’s articles citing the work. Thus, it is calculated by dividing the raw citation frequency by the total number of JBE’s articles published in the time period under consideration.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for indicating this to us.
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This strategy has, for example, been pursed by Journal of Retailing, which recently published a Special Issue in honor to Oliver E. Williamson (Volume 86, Issue 3) and succeeded in hosting the work of the most influential marketing scholars in the field of transaction costs. The prestigious authorship exhibits a high probability to increase citations to these articles and, in turn, to Journal of Retailing when it comes to transactions costs research in marketing.
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Calabretta, G., Durisin, B. & Ogliengo, M. Uncovering the Intellectual Structure of Research in Business Ethics: A Journey Through the History, the Classics, and the Pillars of Journal of Business Ethics . J Bus Ethics 104, 499–524 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-0924-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-0924-8