IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jbrese/v56y2003i1p69-84.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Discovery and communication of important marketing findings: Evidence and proposals

Author

Listed:
  • Armstrong, J. Scott

Abstract

My review of empirical research on scientific publication led to the following conclusions. Three criteria are useful for identifying whether findings are important: replication, validity, and usefulness. A fourth criterion, surprise, applies in some situations. Based on these criteria, important findings resulting from academic research in marketing seem to be rare. To a large extent, this rarity is due to a reward system that is built around subjective peer review. Rather than using peer review as a secret screening process, using an open process likely will improve papers and inform readers. Researchers, journals, business schools, funding agencies, and professional organizations can all contribute to improving the process. For example, researchers should do directed research on papers that contribute to principles. Journals should invite papers that contribute to principles. Business school administrators should reward researchers who make important findings. Funding agencies should base decisions on researchers' prior success in making important findings, and professional organizations should maintain web sites that describe what is known about principles and what research is needed on principles.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Armstrong, J. Scott, 2003. "Discovery and communication of important marketing findings: Evidence and proposals," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 56(1), pages 69-84, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:56:y:2003:i:1:p:69-84
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148-2963(02)00386-7
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. repec:bla:ecorec:v:75:y:1999:i:230:p:256-67 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Kevin J. Fox & Ross Milbourne, 1999. "What Determines Research Output of Academic Economists?," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 75(3), pages 256-267, September.
    3. Joshua S. Gans & George B. Shepherd, 1994. "How Are the Mighty Fallen: Rejected Classic Articles by Leading Economists," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 8(1), pages 165-179, Winter.
    4. Armstrong, J. Scott & Brodie, Roderick J., 1994. "Effects of portfolio planning methods on decision making: experimental results," MPRA Paper 81684, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Eichorn, P. & Yankauer, A., 1987. "Do authors check their references? A survey of accuracy of references in three public health journals," American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, vol. 77(8), pages 1011-1012.
    6. Laband, David N & Piette, Michael J, 1994. "Favoritism versus Search for Good Papers: Empirical Evidence Regarding the Behavior of Journal Editors," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 102(1), pages 194-203, February.
    7. J. Scott Armstrong, 1980. "Unintelligible Management Research and Academic Prestige," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 10(2), pages 80-86, April.
    8. Dakin, Stephen & Armstrong, J. Scott, 1989. "Predicting job performance: A comparison of expert opinion and research findings," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 5(2), pages 187-194.
    9. Deirdre N. McCloskey & Stephen T. Ziliak, 1996. "The Standard Error of Regressions," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 34(1), pages 97-114, March.
    10. Colin B. Begg & Jesse A. Berlin, 1988. "Publication Bias: A Problem in Interpreting Medical Data," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 151(3), pages 419-445, May.
    11. Juan Miguel Campanario, 1996. "The competition for journal space among referees, editors, and other authors and its influence on journals' impact factors," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 47(3), pages 184-192, March.
    12. Hubbard, Raymond & Vetter, Daniel E., 1996. "An empirical comparison of published replication research in accounting, economics, finance, management, and marketing," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 35(2), pages 153-164, February.
    13. Armstrong, J Scott, 1991. "Prediction of Consumer Behavior by Experts and Novices," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 18(2), pages 251-256, September.
    14. Richard H. Franke & Timothy W. Edlund & Frederick Oster, 1990. "The development of strategic management: Journal quality and article impact," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 11(3), pages 243-253, March.
    15. Wells, William D, 1993. "Discovery-Oriented Consumer Research," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 19(4), pages 489-504, March.
    16. Armstrong, J. Scott & Collopy, Fred, 1996. "Competitor Orientation: Effects of Objectives and Information on Managerial Decisions and Profitability," MPRA Paper 81676, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    17. Koehler, Jonathan J., 1993. "The Influence of Prior Beliefs on Scientific Judgments of Evidence Quality," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 56(1), pages 28-55, October.
    18. Ian I. Mitroff, 1972. "The Myth of Objectivity OR Why Science Needs a New Psychology of Science," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 18(10), pages 613-618, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ravenswood, Katherine, 2011. "Eisenhardt's impact on theory in case study research," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 64(7), pages 680-686, July.
    2. Khan, Jashim, 2011. "Validation in marketing experiments revisited," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 64(7), pages 687-692, July.
    3. Lehmann, Donald R., 2003. "Finding important findings," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 56(1), pages 89-90, January.
    4. Min, Kyeong Sam, 2014. "Reviewers are not perfect but could they try harder?," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 67(9), pages 1967-1970.
    5. Emile, Renu, 2011. "Retrospection on the impact of Wallendorf and Brucks' "Introspection in consumer research: Implementation and implications"," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 64(2), pages 194-198, February.
    6. Ulla A. Saari & Rupert J. Baumgartner & Saku J. Mäkinen, 2017. "Eco-Friendly Brands to Drive Sustainable Development: Replication and Extension of the Brand Experience Scale in a Cross-National Context," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 9(7), pages 1-26, July.
    7. Briggs, Elten & Jaramillo, Fernando & Weeks, William A., 2012. "Perceived barriers to career advancement and organizational commitment in sales," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 65(7), pages 937-943.
    8. Saad, Gad, 2020. "The marketing of evolutionary psychology," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 485-491.
    9. Armstrong, J. Scott, 2003. "The value of surprising findings for research on marketing," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 56(1), pages 91-92, January.
    10. Rossiter, John R., 2003. "Qualifying the importance of findings," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 56(1), pages 85-88, January.
    11. Walter Wymer, 2013. "The Influence of Marketing Scholarship’s Legacy on Nonprofit Marketing," IJFS, MDPI, vol. 1(3), pages 1-17, September.
    12. Siemens, Jennifer Christie & Burton, Scot & Jensen, Thomas & Mendoza, Norma A., 2005. "An examination of the relationship between research productivity in prestigious business journals and popular press business school rankings," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 58(4), pages 467-476, April.
    13. Thomas Kenworthy & W. Edward McMullan, 2013. "Finding Practical Knowledge in Entrepreneurship," Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, , vol. 37(5), pages 983-997, September.
    14. Argouslidis, Paraskevas C., 2004. "An empirical investigation into the alternative strategies to implement the elimination of financial services," Journal of World Business, Elsevier, vol. 39(4), pages 393-413, November.
    15. Chong, Josephine L.L, 2010. "Evaluating the impact of Arnould and Wallendorf's (1994) market-oriented ethnography," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 63(12), pages 1295-1300, December.
    16. Seidl, Christian & Schmidt, Ulrich & Grösche, Peter, 2005. "The Performance of Peer Review and a Beauty Contest of Referee Processes of Economics Journals/," Estudios de Economia Aplicada, Estudios de Economia Aplicada, vol. 23, pages 505-551, Diciembre.
    17. J. Scott Armstrong & Ruth Pagell, 2003. "The Ombudsman: Reaping Benefits from Management Research: Lessons from the Forecasting Principles Project," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 33(6), pages 91-111, December.
    18. Ortinau, David J., 2011. "Writing and publishing important scientific articles: A reviewer's perspective," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 64(2), pages 150-156, February.
    19. Geuens, Maggie, 2011. "Where does business research go from here? Food-for-thought on academic papers in business research," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 64(10), pages 1104-1107, October.
    20. Thompson, Ann-Marie K., 2010. "Golder's historical method in research in marketing," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 63(12), pages 1269-1272, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. JS Armstrong & Roderick J. Brodie & Andrew G. Parsons, 2004. "Hypotheses in Marketing Science: Literature Review and Publication Audit," General Economics and Teaching 0412013, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. JS Armstrong, 2005. "Quality Control Versus Innovation in Research on Marketing," General Economics and Teaching 0502050, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Damien Besancenot & Kim Huynh & Joao Faria, 2012. "Search and research: the influence of editorial boards on journals’ quality," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 73(4), pages 687-702, October.
    4. J. Scott Armstrong & Ruth Pagell, 2003. "The Ombudsman: Reaping Benefits from Management Research: Lessons from the Forecasting Principles Project," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 33(6), pages 91-111, December.
    5. Brogaard, Jonathan & Engelberg, Joseph & Parsons, Christopher A., 2014. "Networks and productivity: Causal evidence from editor rotations," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 111(1), pages 251-270.
    6. Hendrik P. van Dalen, 1999. "The Golden Age of Nobel Economists," The American Economist, Sage Publications, vol. 43(2), pages 19-35, October.
    7. Bruno Frey, 2005. "Problems with Publishing: Existing State and Solutions," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 19(2), pages 173-190, April.
    8. Francisco J. Conejo & Lawrence F. Cunningham & Clifford E. Young, 2020. "Revisiting the Brand Luxury Index: new empirical evidence and future directions," Journal of Brand Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 27(1), pages 108-122, January.
    9. Richard Pomfret & Liang Choon Wang, 2003. "Evaluating The Research Output Of Australian Universities' Economics Departments," Australian Economic Papers, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 42(4), pages 418-441, December.
    10. Ruth Ben-Yashar & Shmuel Nitzan, 2001. "Are Referees Sufficiently Informed About The Editor'S Practice?," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 51(1), pages 1-11, August.
    11. Hofmeister Robert & Krapf Matthias, 2011. "How Do Editors Select Papers, and How Good are They at Doing It?," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 11(1), pages 1-23, October.
    12. Bruno S. Frey, "undated". "Publishing as Prostitution? Choosing Between One�s Own Ideas and Academic Failure," IEW - Working Papers 117, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich.
    13. Hatzinikolaou, Dimitris, 2012. "Failure in the market for reviewing economics papers: Good readers, bad referees, and ugly papers," MPRA Paper 45384, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 26 Sep 2012.
    14. Kesten C. Green & J. Scott Armstrong, 2005. "Competitor-oriented Objectives: The Myth of Market Share," Monash Econometrics and Business Statistics Working Papers 17/05, Monash University, Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics.
    15. Siganos, Antonios, 2021. "Guest editor networking in special issues," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 76(C).
    16. Armstrong, J. Scott & Fildes, Robert, 2006. "Making progress in forecasting," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 22(3), pages 433-441.
    17. R. Preston McAfee, 2016. "Edifying Editing," The American Economist, Sage Publications, vol. 61(1), pages 110-118, March.
    18. Peterson, Robert A. & Merunka, Dwight R., 2014. "Convenience samples of college students and research reproducibility," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 67(5), pages 1035-1041.
    19. Paul Gopuran Devassy Bino & Sasidharan Subash & Ananthakrishnan Ramanathan, 2005. "Concentration in Knowledge Output: A case of Economics Journals," European Journal of Comparative Economics, Cattaneo University (LIUC), vol. 2(2), pages 261-279, December.
    20. Marshall H. Medoff, 2003. "Editorial Favoritism in Economics?," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 70(2), pages 425-434, October.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:56:y:2003:i:1:p:69-84. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jbusres .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.