EMR at 15: Reflecting Back on a Journal's Journey

• Author: Arno Haslberger,Yochanan Altman,Njål Andersen
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Date: 01 December 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12339

EMR at 15: Reflecting Back on a

Journal’s Journey

NJÅL ANDERSEN,

1

ARNO HASLBERGER

2

and YOCHANAN ALTMAN

3

1

Norwegian BusinessSchool, Norway

2

Middlesex University Business School, UK

3

Editor-in-Chief, European Management Review

Keywords: European Management Review; bibliometric analysis; co-occurrence analysis; performance; impact

Fifteen years have passed since the inaugural issue of the

European Management Review; a decent time span to

accord us the opportunity to reflect back and evaluate

how the journal stands up to its mission and what impact

it bears on the management research community.

EMR’s core mission tenets throughout its evolvement

have changed little. The journal aims to promote a

European management perspective, address a range of

current management topics and engage with the global

management and business research fields. In this

overview we wish to examine the articles published in

the journal since its inception, in terms of:

•the array of topicscovered (identified throughthe use of

keywords);

•articles’country of origin (on the basis of authors’

affiliated institutions); and

•the journal’s impact (as indicated by the citations EMR

articles receive in other prominent academic journals).

To address these questions quantitative bibliometric

analyses were performed, including co-occurrence

keyword analysis.

Data and method

The primary data source for this study is The Social

Sciences Citation Index® (SSCI), available online

through the Web of Science (WoS); yielding 314 results,

of which 244 are peer reviewed articles, 55 are editorial

content, 11 reviews, three book reviews and one erratum,

published in the EMR between 2004 and 2018. The

analysis was condu cted using VosViewer (van Eck and

Waltman, 2010) and Gephi (Bastian et al., 2009).

Findings

The range of topics covered –keyword co-occurrence

analysis

We start with a co-occurrence analysis of the article

keywords (Callon et al., 1983), which shows both the

most frequently used keywords in the corpus and how

they relate to each other. Proximity in Figure 1 indicates

how often keywords appear together in different articles.

The resulting network graph is interconnected, indicating

how topics complement each other. The keywords group

into four clusters on the following themes: innovation,

strategic management, corporate governance and human

resource management. Table 1 showsthe ten most central

keywords in each theme, demonstrating stability over the

examined period. We will illustrate the findings by

pointing to representative and recent articles for

each cluster.

The most common keyword –‘performance’, appears

in more than 20% of all articles and links to keywords in

all clusters.

1

This indicates that “performance”is

seemingly the most important term in the business and

management fields, irrespective of topic. Whilst hardly

surprising, this finding calls for a pause for thought. Are

we indeed so wedded to performance that it should define

our identity as business and management scholars? Are

we content for it to dominate the discourse in our

domains? Pfeffer (2016) believesthat organization studies

“got off the track”.

1

Notethat in the cluster analysisand network graph,the keyword ‘performance’

is not includedbecause otherwiseit would overshadow all othersand reduce the

clarity of the visualpresentation (Perry et al.,2018).

European Management Review, Vol. 15, 469–474, (2018)

DOI: 10.1111/emre.12339

©2018 European Academy of Management