A Cohort Analysis of Marketing Scholarship

This study investigates the scholarly impact of marketing faculty across career stages. We examine citation counts and research metrics of attendees of the AMA Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium over a 22-year span. We find that students completing their degrees at highly-ranked PhD programs outperform peers early in their careers, but this advantage fades over time. We introduce the “Grand Slam” paper—the single most-cited publication of each scholar—which is generally responsible for a large share of total career citations. It is typically produced early in a scholar’s career and often published outside of the “premier” journals. We introduce the Grand Slam Outlier Effect (GSOE) as a measurement of this phenomenon. Overall, our findings provide new tools for the evaluation of research impact and provide valuable benchmarks for faculty research assessment, institutional comparisons, and career progression, and suggest strategies for faculty members and administrators.