تحلیل استنادی و تحلیل پروفایل تحقیقات قیمت گذاری از سال 1980 تا 2010

This paper identifies the body of literature related to pricing that exists in 20 marketing or business journals contained in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) between January 1980 and June 2010. During this 30-year period we found over 38,800 citations were made to 1945 articles that dealt with some aspect of pricing. Based on these data, we identify individual articles, authors, and institutions that have contributed most to this body of literature. We study what subjects within the domain of pricing have received most attention, and how these topics have evolved in three year periods. In addition, we use text mining and information visualization tools to identify networks of researchers who collaborate on pricing articles. We identify institutional affiliations within the networks and highlight most frequent subjects of articles written by researchers in each network. Our results show pricing is an important topic in the marketing domain.

The marketing discipline has been a constant and significant contributor to literature in the pricing area. Since 1980, there have been over 1900 articles dealing with some aspect of pricing published in the 19 marketing journals included in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and by the Journal of Business Research which has also published many articles focused on pricing. Given the importance of pricing in marketing, it seemed appropriate to try to get a more complete understanding of the impact the marketing discipline has had on pricing research by reviewing the body of literature that exists on pricing across these 20 journals included in SSCI. This will be accomplished by: (1) identifying the articles within the marketing discipline related to managerial issues in pricing; (2) investigating how this published literature has evolved over time; (3) identifying individual articles, authors, and institutions that have made the largest contribution to the published literature on pricing based on citations and number of articles written; and (4) identifying scholar networks in pricing. Along with profiling pricing research using simple counts (e.g. number of articles), the primary metric used in this research is citation counts. Citation analysis is a fairly common (Stremersch et al., 2007) and well-established procedure for examining impact of published articles, as well as, knowledge diffusion (see discussion, for example, in Hood & Wilson, 2001). This is based on the argument that influence can be objectively measured by number of citations of an author, institution or journal—the more citations the greater the influence of that individual, institution or journal. The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) has reported only about 19% of all articles appearing in the top journals in the physical and biological sciences are cited more than once within five years of publication, and when “bottom tier” journals are included the number drops to only 3% (Begley, 1991 and Hamilton, 1991). Similar statistics have been reported by others doing citation research in marketing (Cote et al., 1991). Regarding the 1945 pricing articles used in this paper, 17% (337 articles) had no citations, 9% had only 1 citation, and 48% had 5 or less. Table 1 provides a more complete picture of the drop-off in the number of papers with a large number of citesWith this as a backdrop, we looked at one specific area—pricing—and investigate a) the influence marketing has contributed to knowledge about pricing and b) what individuals, journals and institutions have contributed the most to this domain. We will next describe the methodology of our research. The findings are discussed in detail and illustrated using tables and figures. The paper ends with implications and summary.

This study has used citation and profiling analysis to identify and categorize published research in pricing. The frame for analysis was articles published in 20 most relevant marketing or business journals indexed by the SSCI from January 1980 through June 2010. The tables show the quantity of articles on pricing research for each journal, and the top 25 (and ties) citations record for journals, articles, institutions (weighted and unweighted), authors (weighted and unweighted), and development of subjects. The figures illustrate the author networks in the pricing area. The results provide insight into what articles, individuals, and institutions have had an impact on pricing research in the marketing area. Clearly, pricing remains one of the most important topics in the marketing domain. Unlike some research areas in marketing (i.e. logistics, quality management, and to some degree services) that have been usurped by other disciplines (i.e. operations or management science), marketing appears to be on solid ground with respect to the pricing domain.