FREE ESSAY ON HOW DIVERSIFIED ARE MARKETING JOURNALS

HOW DIVERSIFIED ARE MARKETING JOURNALS

Article Summary of 
In Search of Diversity: The Record of Major Marketing Journals, from the Journal of
Marketing Research {February 1999}.
The title of this article is: In Search of Diversity: The Record of Major Marketing
Journals, from the Journal of Marketing Research {February 1999}. The article described
how three authors analyze the publications of four Marketing journals, and how they
relate to each other against their mission statement. 
According to the article, a study analyzes the publications of four major marketing
journals on the way they relate to each other based on their mission statement. One
finding that these authors found out was that the Journals that claim to be diverse,
failed to be as diverse as their mission states, and other journals that make no claims
on diversity tend to be very diversified. Another finding is that the journals tend to
stay stable with time even if the editors of the journals try to change their ways.
The article starts by saying that there is many articles in journals that are descriptive
research, and that they have touched many aspects of researching different articles that
are being published, but one thing that these descriptive papers have not done , is to
address diversity. What the authors want to know is how diverse are the journal
publications. Moreover, how the level of diversity configures with the mission statement
of each journal. They also wanted to know how diversity of each journal compares with
each other. The authors argue how diversity is very important in academic publishing.
They define diversity in which the journal is open to publishings in a variety of topics.
The article reports on three studies they used to test out how diverse were the
journals.
The authors first focussed on four journals that represent the concept of major marketing
journals. The journals that were chosen were Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of
Marketing. Journal of Marketing Research , and marketing Science. Then the authors
formulated a way to randomly select a sample of each of the published articles of each
journal. After carefully selecting the articles they started on the first study which was
on how the journals used works cited in a diverse way, such as who they cited most and
how broad were the subjects cited. In the second study, the article reviews the
concentration of the context in its citations. They discovered that three of the journals
become less diversified over time. The third study was on the consistency of subjects
throughout a thirty-year period. They discovered the consistency in the trends of the
journals, such as in the early 80's the use lab experiments was going up from 36% in
1980-1981 to 58% in 1990. So the article clearly explains the mathematical logic between
the trends used by each other over a period of time.
The article discusses the important finding, in which they discover that Journal of
Consumer research which states to be diverse does not seem to be as diversified as they
want to be. The journal of Marketing Research which claims to be very logical in one
method actually appears to be very diverse.
In conclusion, the article discusses how it discovered that despite the similarities in
these journals, they seem to be evolving into being very different form each other. By
using different methods to gather research; such as one using field data, instead of lab
data others using verbal logic over mathematical logic. The author also discusses what
the editor should do to further enhance its journal to be more diversified.