Is Microsoft Academic a viable citation source for ranking marketing journals?

Pages569-582
Published date16 September 2019
Date16 September 2019
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-03-2019-0070
AuthorSalim Moussa
Subject MatterLibrary & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management
Is Microsoft Academic a viable
citation source for ranking
marketing journals?
Salim Moussa
Institut Supérieur des Etudes Appliquées en Humanités de Gafsa,
Université de Gafsa, Gafsa, Tunisia
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess the viability of the scholarly search engine Microsoft
Academic (MA) as a citation source for evaluating/ranking marketing journals.
Design/methodology/approach This study performs a comparison between MA and Google Scholar
(GS) in terms of journal coverage, h-index values and journal rankings.
Findings Findings indicate that: MA (vs GS) covers 96.80 percent (vs 97.87 percent) of the assessed
94 marketing-focused journals; the MA-based h-index exhibits values that are 35.45 percent lower than
the GS-based h-index; and that the MA-based ranking and the GS-based ranking are highly consistent.
Based on these findings, MA seems to constitute a rather viable citation source for assessing a marketing
journals impact.
Research limitations/implications This study focuses on one discipline, that is, marketing.
Originality/value This study identifiessome issues that would need to be fixed by the MAs development
team. It recommendssome further enhancementswith respect to journal title entry,publication year allocation
and field classification. It also providestwo up-to-date rankings for more than90 marketing-focused journals
based on actual cites (October 2018) of articles published between 2013 and 2017.
Keywords Ranking, Assessment, Journals, h-index, Marketing, Microsoft Academic
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Using citation analysis to rank journals has a long tradition in marketing (see, e.g. Jobber
and Simpson, 1988; Baumgartner and Pieters, 2003; Guidry et al., 2004; Moussa and
Touzani, 2010). Prior citation-based rankings of marketing journals have used various
citation sources. For instance, Jobber and Simpson (1988) examined the references in a
sample of 25 articles taken from each of the 19 journals that served as their journal
base. Similarly, Guidry et al. (2004) proposed a ranking of 27 marketing journals based on
manual count of citations in articles that appeared between 1997 and 2001 in the then six
top-tier marketing journals (i.e. Journal of Marketing (JM), Journal of Marketing Research
(JMR), Journal of Consumer Research (JCR), Marketing Science (MS), Journal of
Retailing (JR)andJournalof the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS)). Baumgartner and
Pieters (2003) used a manual count along with the Journal Citation Reports (from the
Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)) to collect citation data to rank 49 marketing and
marketing-related journals. More recently, Moussa and Touzani (2010) used GS
(the academic search engine by Google) as a citation source to rank some 69 marketing
journals. In this study, the author tries to assess a different and new citation source:
Microsoft Academic (MA).
Why MA? First, MA is currently (i.e. May 2019) claiming to index about 49,000 journals,
4,390 conferences and nearly 220m publications in 665,000 study fields/topics, marketing
included[1]. Second, several scientometric/bibliometric/informetric studies claim that MA is:
the most promising for citation analysis(Thelwall, 2018b, p. 914); rapidly becoming the
data source of choice(Harzing and Alakangas, 2017b, p. 1894); and is on the verge of
becoming a bibliometric superpower(Hug and Brändle, 2017, p. 1569). This study aims to
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 71 No. 5, 2019
pp. 569-582
© Emerald PublishingLimited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-03-2019-0070
Received 14 March 2019
Revised 18 May 2019
1 June 2019
Accepted 5 June 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
569
Microsoft
Academic

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