A bibliometric analysis of European Financial Managementʼs first 25 years

• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Author: H. Kent Baker,Satish Kumar,Nitesh Pandey
• Date: 01 November 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/eufm.12286

DOI: 10.1111/eufm.12286

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

A bibliometric analysis of European Financial

Managementʼs first 25 years

H. Kent Baker

1

|Satish Kumar

2

|Nitesh Pandey

2

1

Department of Finance and Real Estate,

Kogod School of Business, American

University, Washington,

District of Columbia

2

Department of Management Studies,

Malaviya National Institute of

Technology, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India

Correspondence

H. Kent Baker, Department of Finance

and Real Estate, Kogod School of

Business, American University, 4400

Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington,

DC 20016, USA.

Email: kbaker@american.edu

Abstract

This bibliometric analysis recognizes European

Financial Managementʼs(EFM) 25th anniversary.

EFMʼs output and impact have grown considerably

since 1994. Although EFM focuses on financial issues

in Europe, US authors are now its most frequent con-

tributors. Evidence suggests greater gender diversity

and collaboration among EFM authors over time. Most

EFM publications focus on the stock market and in-

vestor behavior, portfolio performance, risk and risk

management, firm ownership and corporate govern-

ance, banking, and organizational performance. We

also identify key attributes associated with EFMʼs ci-

tations such as article and title length, reference count,

and lead female author.

KEYWORDS

bibliometrics, Europe, financial management, negative binomial

regression

JEL CLASSIFICATION

G0, G10

1|INTRODUCTION

Founded in 1994 by John Doukas, the goal of European Financial Management (EFM)isto

“encourage research and disseminate knowledge about financial decision‐making in all areas of

finance as it relates to European corporations, financial institutions and capital markets”

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© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

The authors thank John Doukas and an anonymous referee for insightful comments on an earlier version, which

helped to improve the paperʼs quality.

(Chan, Chang, & Lo, 2009). It is the flagship journal of the European Financial Management

Association (EFMA). The journal provides a forum for both academics and nonacademics to

contribute research consistent with its stated goal. EFM also offers a platform for short articles

and clinical studies based on recent developments in the business world.

EFMʼs recognition has grown over time. Its impact factor of 1.470 means that the average

citations received by EFM articles published in 2017 and 2018 got 1.470 citations in 2019 from

the journals listed by Clarivate Analytics. According to Scopus, EFMʼs CiteScore is 2.60,

meaning its articles published between 2016 and 2019 received, on average, 2.60 citations. Its

Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) is 0.995, meaning that EFM received, on average,

0.995 citations from journals belonging to its field. A SNIP of 1.0 means that a journalʼs articles

are cited at the average rate for all journals in the same subject area; anything over 1.0 indicates

more citations than average in the field while a SNIP of less than 1.0 is below the average. The

journalʼsh‐index is 61, indicating at least 61 of its publications received a minimum of

61 citations. The Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) and Chartered Association of

Business Schools (CABS) rank EFM as an A and 3, respectively.

In 2019, EFM completed its 25th year of publication. To commemorate this event, we present a

retrospective of the journal. Journals often publish special issues or reviews for milestone events.

Examples include The Accounting Review (Heck & Bremser, 1986), Journal of Financial Economics

(Schwert, 1993), Global Finance Journal (Baker, Kumar, & Pandey, 2019), and Journal of Corporate

Finance (Baker, Kumar, & Pattnaik, 2020). Bibliometric analysis is a popular tool used for such

studies (Cobo, Martínez, Gutiérrez‐Salcedo, Fujita, & Herrera‐Viedma, 2015;Martínez‐López,

Merigó, Valenzuela‐Fernández, & Nicolás, 2018; Merigó, Pedrycz, Weber, & de la Sotta, 2018;

Mulet‐Forteza, Martorell‐Cunill, Merigó, Genovart‐Balaguer, & Mauleon‐Mendez, 2018). Using

bibliometric methodology, we address six research questions.

Q1. What are EFMʼs publication and citation record?

Q2. What journals most frequently cite EFM articles?

Q3. How much collaboration exists among EFM authors?

Q4. How much diversity occurs in EFM regarding gender, academic and nonacademic

authors, as well as institutional and country affiliation with EFM authors?

Q5. What are EFMʼs prominent themes and their evolution?

Q6. What factors are significantly related to EFMʼs total citations and quality citations?

To the best of our knowledge, only one other study offers a retrospective of EFM (Chan et al.,

2009). We extend and improve this previous study in several ways. First, we use Scopus instead of

Google Scholar because the latter source suffers from quality control issues (Waltman, 2016).

According to Li, Sanderson, Willett, Norris, and Oppenheim (2010), citations provided by Scopus

are more strongly correlated with the judgments of library and information science experts than

data from Google Scholar and Web of Science. Second, we analyze publications, collaboration, and

thematic patterns over time, which provide additional insights into EMFʼsgrowth.Third,we

introduce methodological improvements such as using negative binomial regression to identify the

factors contributing to EFMʼs growing impact as measured by citations.

The remainder of the study has the following organization. Section 2provides an overview

of our methodology. Section 3presents EFMʼs publication and citations patterns and section 4

examines journals citing EFM articles. Section 5discusses its collaboration patterns. Section 6

reviews the journalʼs thematic evolution while section 7identifies the drivers associated with its

citations. Section 8provides conclusions.

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2|METHODOLOGY

Bibliometrics is the use of statistical methods to analyze books, articles, and other publications

(Pritchard, 1969). Bibliometric methodology, which is widely accepted in the management field

(Zupic & Čater, 2015), uses citation data to analyze the structure and evolution of a research

area (Valtakoski, 2019). One aspect of bibliometric methodology is performance analysis, which

deals with examining the performance of different actors in any research area, while another is

science mapping, which involves the relation among different themes in an area of interest

(Cobo, López‐Herrera, Herrera‐Viedma, & Herrera, 2011; Ramos‐Rodrígue & Ruíz‐Navarro,

2004). We use performance analysis and science mapping to present EFMʼs publication and

thematic patterns. We also examine the journalʼs current state of collaboration and impact

drivers associated with its citations.

We use various tools and measures to explore EFMʼs publication and citation patterns

including publications and citations per year, which measure productivity and impact, re-

spectively. Other measures include total cites per publication, total cites per cited publication,

and the h‐index (Alonso, Cabrerizo, Herrera‐Viedma, & Herrera, 2009). We also examine

patterns to understand the development of diversity and Co‐authorship across different

periods. Today, research depends heavily on collaboration (Cisneros, Ibanescu, Keen,

Lobato‐Calleros, & Niebla‐Zatarain, 2018) due partly to increased specialization and

methodological complexity (Acedo, Barroso, Casanueva, & Galan, 2006; Cisne ros et al., 2018).

The Co‐authorship analysis is instrumental in understanding the development of greater

collaboration among EFM authors. To measure Co‐authorship, we use a collaboration index,

which is calculat ed by dividing the to tal number of autho rs contributing t o multiauthore d

articles by the total number of multiauthored articles.

Besides analyzing publication and citation trends, we also examine the methodological and

geographical focus of EFM articles. To reduce potential bias, two of the co‐authors in-

dependently reviewed and classified each article by its methodological focus (conceptual or

empirical) and geographical focus (Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Australia,

global or no geographical focus). Our procedure for categorizing EFM articles is similar to Chan

et al. (2009).

We use bibliographic coupling to identify the prominent themes in EFM. Bibliographic

coupling assumes that two documents sharing the same references are likely to contain similar

content (Weinberg, 1974). We determine the degree of similarity using the number of shared

references. As the number of shared references increases, so does the degree of similarity. We

also use the number of shared references to construct a similarity matrix, which in turn serves

as the basis for creating a network where each node represents a document and link strength

represents the shared references by two documents. We divide this network into communities

based on link strength using an algorithm developed by Newman and Girvan (2004), which

results in forming clusters of documents that we use to identify and analyze EFMʼs major

themes. To allot a node to any cluster, we calculate its modularity (Q) using the following

function:

Q

mAkk

mδcc=1

2−2(, )

,

ij

ij

ij

⎡

⎣

⎢⎤

⎦

⎥

∑

where Q= modularity index; A

ij

= weight of the edge between iand j;k

i

= sum of weights of

nodes attached to i;c

i

=iʼs community; δcc(,

)

ij

=1, if c

i

=c

j

and otherwise 0; and m= sum of

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