Dominance of leading business schools in top journals: Insights for increasing institutional representation

Abstract

The competitive push for business schools to publish in prestigious journals has resulted in a disproportionate number of papers in prestigious Management and Operations Research/Management Science (OR/MS) journals coming from a select group of institutions. Our analysis shows the Matthew effect of prestigious journals favors established schools with 51.2 % of papers in 18 Management ABS 4* journals and 61.3 % of papers in 3 OR/MS ABS 4* journals involving authors from the 100 top business schools identified by the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). Citation patterns are similarly concentrated among papers authored by scholars from UTD-listed business schools, with nearly 80 % of citations from 4* Management journals directed to equally rated 4* Management journals (67.8 % for 4* OR/MS journals). An initial regression analysis suggested a positive correlation between the percentage of papers in a journal attributed to authors affiliated with those leading business schools and journal citation performance. However, further examination using multi-level regression adjusted for journal prestige, using the ABS and FT50 lists, showed a negative interaction effect on citation rates for papers from these schools in prestigious OR/MS journals. This insightful finding was confirmed by a post-hoc comparison revealing no significant citation advantage in prestigious journals for papers from leading business schools over those from a broader range of institutions. Thus, while leading business schools benefit from disproportionate space in prestigious journals, this does not translate to a citation advantage for the journals themselves, indicating no Matthew effect at the journal level driven by these schools. We argue that our findings show a unique opportunity for prestigious journals and business schools to expand collaborations with institutions in geographies historically underrepresented without a significant impact on the citation performance of those journals. This inclusion would only benefit research excellence, as our results demonstrate convergence in citation rates, citation patterns on external research areas, and topics across both subsets of papers—from leading institutions and those from a broader institutional spectrum—published in prestigious journals, indicating that diversifying contributions does not compromise the performance of these journals.