Guides · Publishing and impact

What drives citations of marketing articles

In a study of 1,825 articles in five major marketing journals, citations depended more on what an article said (its quality and topic) and who wrote it (author visibility and self-citation in later work) than on how it was written: title length and attention-grabbing words had no reliable effect, and more readable articles were cited less. Across fields, citations also follow social ties and journal prestige, so they measure influence more than validity.

Three explanations for why articles get cited

Scientometric research offers three competing explanations for why one article becomes a building block for later work while another goes unnoticed. The universalist view holds that articles are cited for what they say, meaning their quality and subject. The social constructivist view holds that citations also follow who the authors are, such as how visible they are and how actively they promote their work. The presentation view holds that the way an article is written, including its title and clarity, affects how often it is used.^[1]

The social view builds on Merton's Matthew effect: scientists who are already eminent receive disproportionate credit, and their contributions are more visible than similar work by authors who have not yet made their name. Merton argued that the effect shapes not only who gets credit but also which contributions get noticed, and that a similar process concentrates scientific resources and talent.^[2][1]

What a study of five marketing journals found

Stremersch, Verniers and Verhoef tested the three views together on 1,825 articles published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research and Marketing Science between 1990 and 2002. They counted citations in Social Sciences Citation Index journals up to the end of 2004, excluding self-citations. Citations depended more on what was said and who said it than on how it was said: a model with the universalist variables fitted best, the social model came second and the presentation model came last.^[1]

• Quality proxies mattered. Articles that editors placed earlier in an issue, articles that won a best-article award and longer articles were cited more.^[1]
• Topic mattered. In that period, articles on relationship marketing, services and e-commerce were cited more than average, while articles on advertising, sales and consumer knowledge were cited less.^[1]
• Visibility mattered in part. Authors with longer publication records, editorial board members and authors at higher-ranked business schools were cited more. Against expectations, articles by authors more central in the coauthor network, and articles with more authors, were cited less.^[1]
• Self-promotion mattered in part. Articles that their own authors went on to cite in later work drew more citations from others, but the length of an article's own reference list made no difference.^[1]
• Presentation barely mattered. Title length had no effect, attention-grabbing title words had no reliable effect, articles with more equations were cited slightly less and more readable articles were cited less.^[1]

Why a readable title or abstract is not a shortcut

The negative link between readability and citations is not unique to marketing. A review of studies across many fields found that articles with more readable abstracts were usually cited less, with a single journal as the main exception. The same review found no simple rule for title length: longer titles went with more citations in some journals and fields and with fewer in others, and the direction changed over time in economics.^[3]

Neither pattern means that writing less clearly earns citations. The review stresses that no study it covered showed cause and effect, because a third factor such as article quality, field norms or journal requirements could drive both the style and the citations. Stremersch and colleagues point to earlier work in which peers rated less readable articles as higher in quality, and they add that readability may still help an article reach practitioners, whose use of research their citation measure did not capture.^[3][1]

Social ties shape who cites whom

Citing is partly a social act. Among academic economists in the United Kingdom, one author was more likely to cite another not only when they worked on similar topics but also when they had been coauthors, faculty colleagues or alumni of the same university, and even when they held similar political views. The authors conclude that citation counts capture social and professional connections as well as the quality of research.^[4]

Individual citing habits are also stable. A study of authors' citation identities, the set of people each author cites across a body of work, found a core of repeatedly cited names that reflects the citer's main interests. Social ties often shaped these identities, but the perceived relevance of the cited work appeared to be the main motive.^[5]

In marketing, the finding that editorial board members were cited more has more than one reading. It fits the visibility argument, but Stremersch and colleagues also suggest that strategic citing of board members may play a part, which their data could not separate.^[1]

Patterns that hold across many fields

A broad review of factors associated with citations found that few hold everywhere, and that the strength and even the direction of most associations depend on the set of papers examined. The most consistent predictors were the citation rate of the publishing journal, the number of authors, properties of the reference list and international collaboration. Longer articles tend to be cited more, articles with more and more recent references tend to be cited more, and review articles usually attract more citations than standard research articles.^[3]

Some of these patterns are weaker in business. The review reports a much lower association between the number of authors and citations in business, management and accounting than in most subjects, which is consistent with the marketing finding that articles with more authors were not cited more.^[3][1]

Conceptual and review work stands out in marketing too. In the Journal of Consumer Research, empirical articles had the largest total influence, but review and theory articles had influence out of proportion to their number, and full-length articles were cited far more than notes and comments. A later essay in the Journal of Marketing reported that purely conceptual articles had become rare in top marketing journals even though such articles tend to be more influential than empirical papers.^[6][7]

What citation counts do and do not measure

Citations measure use and influence. Even the founder of citation indexing listed many influences on citation frequency besides scientific merit, among them an author's reputation, how controversial a topic is, a journal's circulation and its availability in libraries. Not every citation reflects intellectual debt, since some references are perfunctory or strategic, for example citing a likely reviewer. And an important article in a small research area can be cited rarely simply because few people work on the topic.^[8][9][6]

Citations do track quality, but loosely. Researchers' own ratings of their papers rise with citations, most clearly for scientific importance, yet the link is too weak to judge a single article. In a large UK research assessment, field-normalised citations correlated positively with expert quality scores in every field, from very weak to strong, and no citation level guaranteed excellent quality. In the behavioural and brain sciences, citation counts and journal impact factors were weak and inconsistent predictors of accurate statistical reporting, evidential value and replicability.^[10][11][12]

What this means for authors

All of this evidence is observational. None of these studies shows that a factor causes citations, and the marketing results describe articles published between 1990 and 2002. With that caveat, the findings point to a few practical choices.^[1][3]

• Put quality and contribution first. Article quality was the most important driver of citations in the marketing study, and none of the presentation variables substituted for it.^[1]
• Treat topic base rates with caution. Subject areas differed in how often they were cited, but the authors warn that these results reflect the past and cannot tell you which topics will be cited in future.^[1]
• Do not cut length reflexively. Longer articles were cited more, and the authors suggest arguing for the space a contribution needs when an editor asks for cuts.^[1][3]
• Build a programme of related papers. Citing your earlier article in follow-up work went with more citations from others, which the authors read as a sign of programmatic research rather than vanity.^[1]
• If your own record is short, consider working with experienced coauthors, since publication record was one of the visibility factors linked to citations.^[1]
• Do not expect a clever or short title to change much. The evidence for title effects is weak in marketing and inconsistent across fields.^[1][3]
• When you read other people's citation counts, treat them as a signal of influence within a network of scholars, not as a verdict on a paper's validity.^[4][10][12]

The evidence behind this

• Citation analysis: what citation counts do and don't tell you
• Marketing knowledge: how it is made and when to trust it

References

1. Stefan Stremersch, Isabel Verniers, Peter C. Verhoef (2007). The Quest for Citations: Drivers of Article Impact. Journal of Marketing.
2. Robert K. Merton (1968). The Matthew Effect in Science. Science.
3. Kayvan Kousha, Mike Thelwall (2023). Factors associating with or predicting more cited or higher quality journal articles: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
4. Carlo D’Ippoliti, Lucio Gobbi, Christian Alexander Mongeau Ospina, Giulia Zacchia (2023). Social determinants of citations: An empirical analysis of UK economists. Kyklos.
5. Howard D. White (2001). Authors as citers over time. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
6. Joseph A. Cote, Siew Meng Leong, Jane Cote (1991). Assessing the Influence of Journal of Consumer Research: A Citation Analysis. Journal of Consumer Research.
7. Deborah J. MacInnis (2011). A Framework for Conceptual Contributions in Marketing. Journal of Marketing, 75(4), 136–154.
8. Eugene Garfield (1972). Citation Analysis as a Tool in Journal Evaluation. Science.
9. Hans Baumgartner, Rik Pieters (2003). The Structural Influence of Marketing Journals: A Citation Analysis of the Discipline and its Subareas over Time. Journal of Marketing.
10. Dag W. Aksnes, Fredrik Niclas Piro, Lone Wanderås Fossum (2023). Citation metrics covary with researchers’ assessments of the quality of their works. Quantitative Science Studies.
11. Mike Thelwall, Kayvan Kousha, Emma Stuart, Meiko Makita, Mahshid Abdoli, Paul Wilson, Jonathan Levitt (2023). In which fields are citations indicators of research quality?. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
12. Michael R. Dougherty, Zachary Horne (2022). Citation counts and journal impact factors do not capture some indicators of research quality in the behavioural and brain sciences. Royal Society Open Science.

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