Identifying research fields within business and management: a journal cross-citation analysis

A discipline such as business and management (B second, for the purpose of normalising citation data as it is well-known that citation rates vary significantly between different disciplines. And third, because journal rankings and lists tend to split their classifications into different subjects—for example, the Association of Business Schools list, which is a standard in the UK, has 22 different fields. Unfortunately, at the moment these are created in an ad-hoc manner with no underlying rigour. The purpose of this paper is to identify possible sub-fields in B&M rigorously based on actual citation patterns. We have examined 450 journals in B&M, which are included in the ISI Web of Science and analysed the cross-citation rates between them enabling us to generate sets of coherent and consistent sub-fields that minimise the extent to which journals appear in several categories. Implications and limitations of the analysis are discussed.