Authorship inequality and elite dominance in management and organizational research: A review of six decades

Ideally, the academic publication process should be meritocratic, fair, and open to diverse groups of researchers. Yet, many scholarly disciplines are far from this ideal. To investigate the extent and nature of overrepresentation in management and organizational research, we examined 60-year publication trends in three closely related subfields: Management (MNGT), Human Resource Management (HRM), and Industrial-Organizational Psychology (IOP). Analyzing over 60,000 publications from 42 top-tier journals, our study reveals an increasing trend in authorship inequalities and a growing dominance of the scientific elite. Individual-level analyses, along with journal and field-level comparisons, show that a select group of researchers has become more influential over time, leading to rising disparities in authorship. Field-level comparisons also show that the most productive IOP researchers publish significantly more articles than those in other fields. Besides rising numbers of publications, the super-elite of IOP are found to dominate more journals, as evidenced by a higher frequency of the same authors appearing on the top-10 most productive list in IOP than in the other two fields. Through network analyses, we revealed that IOP consistently shows a large giant component, indicating that a large portion of IOP authors is part of the “same connected network,” reflecting a highly collaborative field where even smaller groups are connected to the broader network. We recommend future advancements in theory, practice, and policy to address these inequalities and promote a more inclusive and equitable research environment.