Empirical Regularity in Academic Research Productivity Patterns in Marketing

In any academic discipline, published articles in respective journals represent “production units” of scientific knowledge, and bibliometric distributions reflect the patterns in such productivity across authors or "producers." We use a comprehensive data set from 11 leading marketing journals to examine if there is any empirical regularity in the patterns of research productivity in the marketing literature. Our results present strong evidence that there is indeed a distinct empirical regularity. It is the so called generalized Lotka’s Law of scientific productivity pattern: the number of authors publishing n papers is about 1/n^c of those publishing one paper. We find the empirically estimated value of the exponent c to be 2.05 for the overall bibliometric data across the leading marketing journals. For the individual journals, the estimated values of c range from 2.15 to 2.83, with lower values indicating higher authorship concentration levels. We also find that variations in authorship concentration levels across journals and over time are driven by a journal’s maturity, topical focus, attractiveness as a publication outlet, review process characteristics, and the extent of author collaboration present. We discuss the general implications of our findings