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Publishing in top-level academic journals is both a personal achievement and a crucial
requirement in every scholar’s career, albeit the institutional demands vary markedly among
countries and institutions. Whilst the number of universities and scholars seeking to publish internationally is increasing worldwide, an a priori observation of the track record of publications seems to reveal that publishing in top-level business or management journals is highly dominated by North Americans.
In this study, we scrutinize the effect of a set of factors – expenditure on education, R&D, English language proficiency and math competency - may influence the likelihood of publishing in top-ranked management journals. We conduct a statistical analysis to examine the role played by English proficiency – the main language for international publication –, quantitative competency and research funding -, on the likelihood of publishing in top-tier management journals.
The extant research on the factors that influence scientific publication has analyzed many aspects that may account for the publication differences across countries. For instance, Man et al. (2004) have shown that national factors such as research funding and English proficiency are crucial in determining the scientific output of a country in high impact medical journals. Geuna and Martin (2003) and Leydesdorf and Wagner (2009) compared countries on cost-benefit of research funding.
Top-tier journals are indicators of the research excellence in a discipline (Podsakoff et al. 2005; Certo et al. 2010), thus methodologically, we constructed a database with all articles published in the four top-tier management/business journals assessed by their JCR 2014 impact factors published over the six years from 2009 to 2014. On a sample of 1,322 articles published in these journals we collected data on the number of authors, their affiliations and nationality of affiliation.
The results indicate that English proficiency and research funding were positively related to the number of articles published by the scholars in a country. The quantitative competency, contrary to our expectation, had a no impact on the number of articles published. A possible explanation is that perhaps scholars from countries that excel in math tend to migrate to other areas with higher mathematical content, such as engineering, finance, natural and hard sciences.
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