Overview of the leading countries in marketing research between 1990 and 2014: A bibliometric analysis

The purpose of this paper is to present a general overview of the most influential countries according to their scientific contributions in marketing for the 1990–2014 period. In this bibliometric-based research, the authors generate a ranking of the 50 most influential nations according to the H-index and citations per paper, co-authorship, citation analysis and bibliographic coupling. The study provides a map that identifies the networks of researchers between countries.

The method used is bibliometric analysis. The relevant research in marketing was extracted from Web of Science Database Core Collection, during the 1990–2014 period; 29,947 published articles in 50 countries were obtained. The investigation used: H-index as the first criterion in creating the country ranking, number of articles (TP) as a proxy for the productivity of each country, the average citation per article (C/P) and the number of citations (TC) to express the influence of a country’s articles. In addition, the study adopts VOSviewer software to identify the collaboration networks of researchers between countries and the links between countries.

The results reveal a general level that 54 percent of countries have a category H-index greater than 20. In turn, the authors see a steady increase in the number of publications over the five-year periods. The first ten countries account for over 80 percent of all publications of the sample. The USA is presented here as the leader in all indicators and highlights the important role that China has been developing.

Several limitations of the study result from the use of the Web of Science database. For example, each journal, author, university and/or country involved in a specific paper is considered a single unit. Therefore, in research papers with more than one author or with authors from different universities and/or countries, only the lead author is considered in the analysis. In addition, the study does not include new trends in publications between 2014 and 2018. However, there are other databases that could have been used such as: Scopus, Google Scholar, among others.

The findings are relevant for students, academics, organizations and governments, which may use this information for decision making on future research, identifying countries concerning the area and their relationships.

This paper shows progress and contribution of the most influential countries according to their scientific contribution in marketing during the period 1990–2014. This research is relevant because until now there has been no study with the sole purpose of ranking countries according to their marketing publications. In this sense, the study is useful to academics, publishers, educational institutions or other interested in marketing. The study provides a knowledge domain map that identifies the collaboration networks of researchers between countries and the links between countries.