Publication and citation patterns of Austrian researchers in operations research and other sub-disciplines of business administration as indexed in Web of Science and Scopus

Abstract

There are many studies which compared the publication and citation patterns among different research disciplines. However, one level below, potential differences within disciplines are not as well researched. Our article contributes to the research of said level by investigating the publication and citation behaviours of ten sub-disciplines of business administration and the potential differences between them. Of particular interest is a comparison of Operations Research with the other nine sub-disciplines. As research method, we conducted a scientometric analysis covering 283 professors at Austrian universities that offer a business administration program. Their publications over a ten-years period and the citations they have accumulated were retrieved from Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. The results unveil strong differences between the analysed ten sub-disciplines, which are partially even greater than those between overall disciplines. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, we expected to see some peculiarities in the results for Operations Research. Authors from this sub-discipline are very present in WoS and Scopus. This sub-discipline achieves the highest average number of publications per researcher, and the highest self-citation rate. Apart from Operations Research, some other sub-disciplines also showed particular characteristics. This concerns especially Accounting, where publications often appear in German and in practitioner journals due to their national legalistic content. As was expected, Scopus overall has a higher coverage than WoS. However, the extent varies strongly among sub-disciplines.