Abstract
Complementing Nielsen and colleagues’ (2020) analysis of methodological trends in the Journal of International Business Studies over the past 50 years, we examine similar data on methods published in a wider range of leading international business (IB) journals. Our analysis shows a clear decline of studies based on primary data relative to secondary data, and a persistently low level of individual-level studies among the growing body of research using secondary data across all IB journals considered. We discuss the main mechanisms driving these trends and identify the problems of IB’s increasing exposure to the risks inherent in secondary data. We also discuss the implications related to neglecting individual-level data for theory advancement in IB, such as a disregard for novel secondary data opportunities at the individual level and the risk of reduced theoretical pluralism. In doing so, we substantially extend the debate initiated by Nielsen and colleagues (2020).
Highlights
Nielsen and colleagues (2020) have produced very valuable insights into the methodological choices of articles published in the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) over the last 50 years
Complementing Nielsen and colleagues’ (2020) analysis of methodological trends in the Journal of International Business Studies over the past 50 years, we examine similar data on methods published in a wider range of leading international business (IB) journals
Our results show that secondary data have been widely used in IB and accounts for 48.7% of all published empirical papers
Summary
Nielsen and colleagues (2020) have produced very valuable insights into the methodological choices of articles published in the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) over the last 50 years. The declining share of primary data in IB type of data over another can have serious implications for theory generation and testing, the field’s exposure to specific methodological risks, and the field’s advancement In their analysis, Nielsen et al (2020) do not address earlier speculations that the IB field may have neglected the role of individuals, their motivations, abilities, and actions, or interactions between them, which means that many IB phenomena are incompletely captured by our field. While Nielsen and colleagues’ insights are very valuable, they do not take into account other relevant IB journals
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