Get Promoted in Marketing Academia
The January 2009 issue of the Journal of Marketing includes a study by Steven H. Seggie and David A. Griffith (“What Does It Take to Get Promoted in Marketing Academia? Understanding Exceptional Publication Productivity in the Leading Marketing Journals”) that marketing academics will find especially interesting and insightful. This study focuses on publications in four leading marketing journals (JM, JMR, JCR, and MKS) to explore three issues: (1) the level of research productivity needed for marketing faculty to get promoted, (2) a benchmark of exceptional research productivity in marketing, and (3) the generation of new insights on the factors that may influence research productivity.
The authors’ findings indicate that marketing faculty from top-10 institutions who were successfully promoted to the rank of associate professor published an average of .57 articles per year in leading journals for the period between doctoral conferral and this promotion; comparable averages for faculty from top 11-20, top 21-40, and top 41-70 institutions were, respectively, .47, .47, and .26 articles per year in leading journals. Similarly, for the period between promotion to associate professor and promotion to full professor, marketing faculty from top-10 institutions published an average of .61 articles per year; comparable figures for top 11-20, top 21-40, and top 41-70 institutions were, respectively, .43, .35, and .24 articles per year.
To benchmark exceptional research productivity, the authors’ ranked scholars (who obtained a PhD before 2002) over the 1982-2006 period by publication rate denoted by Ri (i.e., average publications per year after receiving the Ph.D degree). They report both unadjusted Ri and Ri adjusted for the number of coauthors in publications. The former metric is useful if one accepts the view that a publication in a leading marketing journal is valuable in itself, regardless of the number of coauthors involved. The adjusted metric assumes that all coauthors contributed equally to each published article, which is the case when the order of authorship is explicitly acknowledged as either random or alphabetical. In other cases, however, the degree of contribution may vary across authors.
Pradeep Chintagunta, Stefan Stremersch, Michel Wedel, and Ran Kivetz led the unadjusted Ri list of prolific marketing scholars, and Alexander Chernev, Pradeep Chintagunta, Ran Kivetz, and Craig Thompson led the adjusted Ri list. Seggie and Griffith also note that 78.26% of the 2672 marketing scholars included in their database had a publication count ranging between 1 and 3 in the four leading journals, 11.53% had a count ranging between 4 and 6, 8.35% had a count between 7 and 14, and 1.87% had a count greater than 14. For the 1982-2006 period, Donald Lehmann, Pradeep Chintagunta, Morris Holbrook, and Gerard Tellis emerged as the top four prolific scholars with 30, 28, 28, and 26 publications in leading marketing journals, respectively. Finally, the authors report that the “level of institution from which a scholar receives his or her academic training can be used as an indicator of potential academic success.” They also find that gender does not influence publication productivity in the leading marketing journals.
Seggie and Griffith should be commended for their careful compilation and analyses of publication data. They identify important limitations and suggestions for future research. For example, they note that using a journal’s impact score and/or the citation rate for a specific author/article may add greater insight. Such analyses can verify whether the assumptions about equivalence of articles across the four journals, and across articles within a given journal, are reasonable. One intriguing suggestion from the authors is to carefully evaluate the “substantive contribution” for each article in a manner that provides greater insight than traditional citation analyses. In a similar spirit, it would be useful to analyze whether award-winning articles are perceived differently during the promotion process because they (1) garner greater visibility and esteem, (2) recognize actual impact on the discipline over a period, and/or (3) reflect the shared view of leading marketing academics who serve on editorial boards. Although award-winning articles represent a small sample, establishing a new conversion metric that benchmarks an award-winning article’s average perceived equivalence in terms of regular articles in leading journals may be a welcome extension of the authors’ work.
I greatly appreciate the authors’ important insights on this new research topic. I request JM readers to take a moment now to comment on their very interesting article.
Siva K. Balasubramanian, Journal of Marketing Web site Editor
