ساختار و تکامل کسب و کار برای کسب و کار بازاریابی: تجزیه و تحلیل استنادی و هم استنادی

The field of business-to-business (B2B) marketing has grown considerably in the past four decades. However the state of knowledge about its structure and evolution remains limited. Who are the key players and what are the key papers in B2B marketing? What main research topics have been investigated over time? This article answers these questions by applying bibliometric methods for the first time to the existing body of scholarly B2B research. The key findings reveal a highly dynamic discipline in the 1970s and 1980s, when new knowledge was being intensively exchanged among an increasing number of B2B researchers. Since that time, the pace of development has slowed, and diversification in the discipline manifested itself in a distinctive number of core research subfields. Yet initial research topics such as organizational buying behavior, where much research is still undone, are to a large extent not addressed by modern B2B scholars.

Almost every scholar active in business-to-business (B2B) marketing holds intuitive beliefs about the evolution of the field, the development and connections across its main research fronts, and the most influential publications, authors, and journals. Yet these insights tend to be subjective, supported by virtually no confirmation with objective, data-based bibliometric approaches such as citation and co-citation analyses. Unlike other disciplines of similar maturity, literature generated by the scientific B2B community has not yet been analyzed systematically to reveal its intellectual development. This gap is astonishing, because a better understanding of a field's past enables researchers to assess its current structure and define avenues for research with greater sophistication (Culnan, 1986). In the case of B2B marketing, retrospective studies are limited to general literature reviews, such as those published in a special issue of Journal of Business Research that outline the accomplishments of four B2B research outlets: Industrial Marketing Management (IMM), Advances in Business Marketing and Purchasing (ABMP), Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing (JBIM), and Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing (JBBM) (Johnston and Lewin, 1997, LaPlaca, 1997, Lichtenthal et al., 1997 and Plank, 1997). Some more comprehensive reviews, such as those provided by Webster, 1978, Reid and Plank, 2000 and LaPlaca and Katrichis, 2009, examine the contents of B2B articles and classify them into topic areas, which again depends to a certain extent on the subjective views of their authors (Ramos-Rodriguez & Ruiz-Navarro, 2004). These studies show that the most frequently published research area in B2B marketing is organizational buying behavior (OBB), a primary focus of research activity when the field began (LaPlaca & Katrichis, 2009). Since then, various lines of B2B research have emerged to enlarge the field so much that investigations based solely on B2B publications cannot describe it accurately. For example, B2B researchers might draw regularly on publications that appear outside the discipline or on authors who function in parallel fields, yet these sources do not appear in literature reviews (White & McCain, 1998), despite their potential influence. This article focuses on how intra- and extra-disciplinary publications and their authors have influenced the growth of B2B marketing; therefore, it enhances prior research based on literature reviews and provides greater objectivity.

Cronin (1998, p. 48) calls citations “frozen footprints in the landscape of scholarly achievement” that reveal interaction patterns among researchers and thus evidence of a discipline's structure (Üsdiken & Pasadeos, 1995). A few studies have described the state and evolution of B2B marketing, but no study has used the vast amount of citation data available for this purpose. To enhance prior research and assess the intellectual structure of B2B marketing through a different perspective, this article applies bibliometric methods for the first time to this research field. Regarding the first research question, the findings of the citation analysis reveal a picture of B2B marketing that is characterized by continuous growth and an increasing number of cited publications and authors. The initially low age of sources and the high fluctuation within the rankings of the most cited articles in each period depict a highly dynamic field with short research cycles in the initial analysis periods. Among the cited works, Robinson et al. (1967) and Webster and Wind (1972a) emerge as classics that provide the foundation for the field. Over time citations of these publications decline as the thematic differentiation of the discipline increases and their basic concepts become universally accepted (Ramos-Rodriguez & Ruiz-Navarro, 2004). Other works, such as those by Morgan and Hunt (1994) and Dwyer, Schurr, and Oh (1987), with a more distinctive research focus take their place in terms of citations and contribute to the coming of age of the discipline. Such increasing maturity occurs together with reduced research dynamism since the most cited articles in the last two periods are quite similar. Moreover, the growing use of articles published in journals and the decreasing level of self-citations, as are common in younger disciplines, supports the notion of maturation in this era. The subsequent co-citation analysis traced the evolution of B2B marketing, as summarized in Fig. 5, by detecting and comparing different research fronts in each period. The size of the labels represents the size of the clusters in the co-citation networks. Full-size image (33 K) Fig. 5. Overview on the evolution of B2B marketing. Note: The size of the letters reflect the size of the clusters; the asterisk (*) indicates reappearing themes. OBB = organizational buying behavior, Mgmt. = Management, Rel. = Relationships, Orient. = Orientation, Mkt. = Marketing, Res. = Research. Figure options In this context, four key findings emerge. First, the increasing number of authors and clusters into the last period reflects the growth and diversification of the discipline. Second, its fading research dynamism, as also detected by the citation analysis, is supplementary confirmed by the decreasing fluctuation of cluster members and topics within the networks over time. Third, the increasing interaction of B2B subfields over time suggests convergence in the core B2B subfields, resulting in the establishment of a common knowledge base. Isolated approaches thus get replaced increasingly by combined research designs. Synergies across core research directions enable the joint application of different schools of thought to special research issues by contemporary authors. Fourth, considering the topical breadth of B2B marketing research, it becomes obvious that personal selling and organizational buying behavior were the initial focus of the discipline, in compliance with LaPlaca and Katrichis's (2009) literature review findings. Over time though, these research areas have been deserted by B2B researchers, although they remain underresearched. In the past 20 years, interactions among industrial transaction partners, as expressed by the period-spanning buyer–seller relationship topic, came to dominate scientific discussions. More and more specialized approaches, including some with methodological backgrounds, additionally become the focus of scientific efforts in the field of B2B marketing. Thus the diversification of the discipline parallels an increasing connectivity of core B2B research areas and more comprehensive exchanges of relevant knowledge. However, the true degree of diversification in the discipline is hard to assess, because upcoming and specialized research fields usually lack sufficient co-citation relationships to compose their corresponding clusters. This trend may be fostered by deviations in the topical orientation of the articles in both B2B and general marketing journals. Because articles in a particular group of journals might focus on different sets of topics, with their unique references, such distinctive issues probably do not become manifest in the results of a cross-journal citation analysis. Furthermore, the share of B2B articles from general marketing journals increased to 30% of the data population in the last period, so it is likely that only the core B2B research fields receive enough citations from both groups to be revealed in a co-citation analysis.