Returns to Scaling: Inter-Field Comparability of Citations to Business Scholarship

Abstract

Citation measures are often employed to evaluate scholarship in business schools. We document here that citation practice as measured by the number of references per published article varies systematically across top-ranked journals in business school fields (accounting, economics, finance, management, marketing, MIS, and operations). We develop a set of scale factors, based on references per article and inter-field citation patterns, for making citation measures comparable across fields. Because economics articles tend to cite literature sparingly, raw citation measures are systematically biased against economic scholarship.