One of the central questions in this paper is whether corporate governance is a distinct discipline or an interdisciplinary subject. The distinction is important because of the way that departments within business schools evaluate faculty for promotion and tenure. A perennial discussion in the business literature is whether corporate governance is a distinct discipline or whether it is an interdisciplinary field as described above. Durisin and Puzone assert that corporate governance is a discipline based on their analysis of citations from CGIR and other journals.⁵ They argue that corporate governance research is seen as relevant but intellectually inferior, and they demonstrate using citation analysis that a strong intellectual foundation for corporate governance exists in the fields of management, economics, finance, and accounting.

Disciplines, as described by Salter and Hearn, have both a core of knowledge and an organizational infrastructure that supports further knowledge production.⁶ The knowledge core includes both discipline specific knowledge and theoretical knowledge that underpins the discipline. According to Becher and Trower, infrastructure refers to the social and connective schema that holds the discipline together and includes everything from discipline specific journals and conferences to defining the social norms and expectations placed on scholars who belong to that discipline.⁷ The social aspects of disciplinary membership for interdisciplinary researchers are particularly important in the context of this paper. The authors contend that corporate governance research is interdisciplinary and offer a framework from which they can discuss the unique challenges to interdisciplinary researchers in business schools. The hallmarks of an interdisciplinary field are exactly what Durisin and Puzone show in their article—the widespread inclusion of corporate governance topics in established disciplinary areas.⁸

One measure of interdisciplinarity is the number of citations in journal articles that come from related disciplinary areas. Porter and Rafols provide evidence that science areas are becoming more interdisciplinary, though the exact reasons are not clear.⁹ Rinia and colleagues examine citations from Science Citation Index and demonstrate that basic science disciplines (e.g., biology, mathematics, and physics) routinely share literature with one another.¹⁰ Leavitt, Thelwall, and Oppenheim conducted a similar study for social science fields, which confirmed that the social sciences also share literature between disciplines.¹¹

While interdisciplinary subjects draw on knowledge from their core disciplines, they also develop new methods and paradigms that may, over time, evolve into new disciplinary areas. Distinctions in the minutiae between disciplinary, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary research are complex and beyond the scope of this paper. Van den Besselaar and Heimeriks provide a cogent introduction to the subject and propose an indicator of interdisciplinarity “based on the patterns and intensity of knowledge streams between research fields.”¹² A large body of literature describes trends in interdisciplinary research that focuses on both science and social science fields.¹³ Klein’s 1996 book on the interdisciplinary nature of knowledge and research, now a classic, contains a thorough examination of interdisciplinarity.¹⁴ Ostreng focuses on how interdisciplinary research interacts with traditional disciplines in the sciences.¹⁵ The best current discussion of issues related to interdisciplinary research is edited by Frodeman, Klein, and Mitcham.¹⁶

Interdisciplinary subjects pose challenges for libraries in both collection management and reference activities. One of the challenges for librarians is identifying the domain of interdisciplinary subjects. This in turn leads to questions about information seeking by interdisciplinary scholars and the best way for librarians to provide services. Dobson, Kushkowski, and Gerhard describe the characteristics of interdisciplinary subjects and propose an approach for evaluating collections of interdisciplinary materials.¹⁷ They maintain that familiarity with the subject domains of interdisciplinary fields is central to successfully evaluating interdisciplinary collections. A complete issue of Library Trends in 1996 discussed the impact of interdisciplinary fields and included articles about subject domains, information seeking, and aligning library services with the research practices of interdisciplinary scholars.¹⁸

Literature that is more recent elaborates on those issues and informs current thought about libraries and interdisciplinary scholars. Palmer and Cragin discuss how information science has adapted to the changing landscape of disciplinary change, focusing on “the social dimension of scholarly practice and its influence on how information is collected.”¹⁹ Witt and Rudasill’s 2010 book elaborates on the challenges of increased interdisciplinary research for libraries supporting the social sciences.²⁰ Topics in the volume include an examination of differences in data-sharing practices between disciplines, a rethinking of traditional cataloging and collection management systems to accommodate interdisciplinary knowledge (e.g., into what traditional subject areas does sustainability studies fall?), and the development of research portals that facilitate the discovery of interdisciplinary knowledge.

Most reputable business schools are accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB International) in a process that involves a detailed self-study, a site visit, and the development of a detailed school mission statement that defines the goals and parameters in which the school operates. Accreditation standards require that institutions support “successful achievement of all dimensions of the stated missions with particular focus on high quality degree programs and scholarly research.”²¹ They also require that schools provide “clear expectations regarding the quality of the intellectual contributions and how quality is assured (e.g., specific target journals or outlets, selectivity requirements, etc.).”²²

A consequence of accreditation criteria is the need for business schools to quantify the research output of their faculty. Schools can meet the accreditation criteria for demonstrating research quality by comparing their faculty’s publishing output with journal lists that identify the top journals in a discipline. One side effect of this reliance on journal lists tied to business school accreditation is a large literature devoted to journal lists. Durisin and Puzone’s article includes an extensive bibliography about core lists.²³ Journal lists are available for business disciplines including accounting, finance, economics, and management areas and can be easily discovered by searching for “core list” and the discipline (e.g., accounting) in a database such as ABI/Inform.

In the realm of online resources, Harzing’s Journal Quality List (JQL) website provides a meta-analysis of journal rankings across a variety of business journal rankings.²⁴ JQL is a compilation of journal ranking studies in business fields including economics, finance, accounting, management, and marketing. Harzing’s Publish or Perish website allows researchers to calculate publication metrics based on the availability of their work in Google Scholar.²⁵

The use of core journal lists to provide evidence of research quality is not a phenomenon unique to the United States. Quantifying research output is an issue for universities in Europe, where institutional productivity is evaluated at a national level and the results are used to allocate research funding.²⁶ Journal lists for disciplines across the academy are one of the metrics used to define institutional research productivity. The Research Assessment Exercise in the United Kingdom uses the Association of Business Schools (ABS) list of journals when evaluating research productivity of business schools.²⁷ ABS is the British accrediting body for business schools. These periodic assessments of research productivity are used to determine research funding for universities in the United Kingdom and other European countries. The use of core journal lists to assess institutional productivity may explain the proliferation of journal lists across disciplines.

Core lists may be developed by individual departments but enough published journal lists exist so that schools can select from published lists instead of creating their own. Data for lists often come from Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Reports and the use of ISI impact factors and citation counts are one method of developing core journal lists. Authorship studies, as represented by Heck, Zaleski, and Dressler, explore who publishes in a discipline.²⁸ This particular article used journal citations found in a list of elite economics journals to explore the contributions of authors by academic institution to economics journal literature.

Citation analysis studies generally fall into two categories. The first is a citation analysis of a specific journal. Lindquist and Smith’s citation analysis of the Journal of Management Accounting Research is an example of studies done to celebrate a milestone anniversary for a journal.²⁹ Studies of this type are common in business literature (and other disciplines) and can be used to discover the range of journals used in a discipline. The second type of citation study is broader and assesses the literature within a specific discipline or subdiscipline. In their study of corporate social responsibility and corporate social performance, De Bakker, Groenewegen, and Den Hond compiled citations from Social Science Citation Index and ABI/Inform and used them to map the scope of their subject.³⁰ The primary difference between the two approaches is that the former uses a single journal as a data source and the latter uses search results on a particular subject as the starting point.

In addition to the use of citation counts, other methods can be used to develop core journal lists. Wu, Hao, and Yao surveyed department heads to gather perceptions from department heads about journal rankings in accounting, finance and information systems.³¹ Preference studies query department heads, faculty, business school deans, or other experts for an assessment of journal reputation based on personal knowledge. The ranking of management journals by Harris is based on multiple sources of data including expert opinion and citation indexes.³² It provides greater granularity and subject breadth than other management journal lists. By contrast, Ritzberger’s list of 261 economics journals relies on a variant of the algorithm Google uses to rank search engine results.³³

Many of the methods described above are familiar to library and information science (LIS) researchers. Citation analyses of journals or disciplines are a staple of LIS research, as are surveys of stakeholders about journal preferences. Quantitative studies may rely on data from the Journal Citation Reports or other bibliographic data. The examples above are representative of categories of core list methodologies, not an exhaustive list of methods. For each method, multiple studies are available in the business literature, and variations in method often reflect the differences in methodological approaches between business disciplines. One insight from the wealth of core journal studies in business is that no consensus about how to create core lists exists.

Journal ranking in business schools has been the subject of many critiques, both methodological and otherwise. Considering the stakes for faculty whose careers may rise or fall on the basis of a core journal list, such critiques are understandable. A common thread that runs through the critiques of journal ranking is the reliance on the use (some would say misuse) of the journal impact factor for determining research worth.

Journal impact factor (JIF) is a metric developed by Eugene Garfield in Journal Citation Reports (JCR), now owned by Thomson Reuters. The JIF measures the ratio of citations to a journal to the number of citable items published in that journal over a period. JCR includes both the two-year and five-year JIFs for journals, though one can use the data to calculate impact factors for different lengths of time. The different JIFs are provided as a way of recognizing that not all disciplines cite their literature at the same rate. Publishing lags in social science disciplines (e.g., sociology) may mean that the five-year JIF is a better representation of journal reputation than in a science discipline (e.g., chemistry) where publishing, and possible citations to articles, happens more quickly.

A number of substantive critiques, many from outside of the business literature, about the use of the JIF have been written. Seglen enumerates twenty-three reasons not to use JIF to evaluate research. Among the reasons not to use JIF is that it “conceals the difference in article citation rates” within a journal.³⁴ He contends that only a few articles in any given journal issue are highly cited and that relatively few articles contribute to the JIF for a given journal. Althouse and colleagues focus on the variation in JIFs across disciplines and the upward trend in JIFs over time, a trend also explored in research by Campanario.³⁵ These articles argue that the increases in JIFs are the result of increased citations within articles and are not necessarily indicative of changes in journal quality. Neff and Olden demonstrate that an increased number of citations in journal articles inflates the JIF of ecology journals.³⁶

Other critiques of JIF (and other journal metrics), such as the article by Finch, point out that no perfect method for evaluating articles and journals exists.³⁷ Sala and Brook explore the bias introduced into JIFs when multiple authors in an article cite their previous work.³⁸

Critiques of journal lists within the business literature are similar to those of other fields. Adler and Harzing offer a meta-analysis of journal ranking methods, including those that use the JIF.³⁹ Their main objection to the use of the JIF is that it equates journal quality with article quality. Singh, Haddad, and Chow found that top management journals received more citations, but that not all the articles in top journals were of the same quality.⁴⁰ In a study related to journal lists, Bornmann and Dieter found that citation decisions are a complex phenomenon that includes both social and practical aspects.⁴¹

Other critiques of journal lists from business fields focus on the use of those lists by departments or colleges. Lange found that, while schools do indeed rank business journals, little consistency in ranking is found between institutions.⁴² Adams and Johnson report that the implementation of a journal list at the University of Houston “is imperfect” but that the consistency of annual reviews has increased.⁴³ Henderson, Ganesh, and Chandy argue that faculty are specialists and are not necessarily able to judge work of other scholars because of limited knowledge of other fields.⁴⁴ Noteworthy is that critiques of journal lists and the JIF are found across disciplines, an indication that concerns about the use of the JIF are a nearly universal concern among academics.

This research uses citation analysis as a tool for developing a core list of journals in corporate governance. Citation analysis is one of many tools used by both business faculty and library and information science researchers to examine the intellectual structure of disciplines. A number of recent library and information sciences titles explore bibliometric methods, including citation analysis. De Bellis provides a theoretical overview of bibliometric methods in library and information science, while the volume by Andrés has a more practical focus.⁴⁵ A specific discussion of bibliometric methods for revealing interdisciplinary fields can be found in an article by Morris and Van der Veer Martens.⁴⁶

Business disciplines have a long tradition of using citation analysis to examine trends in business literature. Citation analysis is used in several ways to examine business literature beyond compiling journal lists. Lindquist and Smith note that citation analysis of a single journal is usually done as a retrospective for journal anniversaries and also may include content analysis of article subjects and authorship.⁴⁷ De Baaker, Groenewegen, and Den Hond describe how the structure of disciplines or subdisciplines can be investigated to delineate subject boundaries.⁴⁸ Matherly and Shortridge conducted a meta-analysis of journal ranking studies that provides new measures for determine journal quality.⁴⁹ Bibliometric analysis of journal literature provides multiple means of assessing and evaluating subject literature in disciplinary or interdisciplinary fields.

The data are limited by possible errors in data entry, coding, and possible errors in the original citations. The authors provided training on identifying different types of citations and checked citations in random articles throughout the data collection process as a quality check. Multiple coders for the citations may present a problem in inter-coder reliability because the authors did no formal reliability checks.

The authors counted individual citations without regard for duplicates; unlike co-citation analysis, the authors did not track multiple occurrences of the same article. The authors counted citations to each journal without regard for duplicate citations. Likewise, the authors ignored the contributions of individual scholars. Other studies look at authorship contributions of authors within CGIR and examine corporate governance as an interdisciplinary field.⁵⁴ Finally, the authors acknowledge that assessing journal quality is a subjective process and that institutions and even departments within the same school of business may disagree about what constitutes a quality journal.

The spreadsheets provide detailed information about how many citations a journal received in any given year. Using this information, the authors constructed a core list that includes any journal cited in CGIR at least once a year in five or more consecutive years. Limiting the scope of the core list eliminated infrequently cited journals and focuses attention on heavily cited titles. A total of 137 journals are cited at least once a year in five or more consecutive years, including a total of 7,487 journal citations, representing 12 percent (137) of the 1,116 titles and 78 percent (7,487) of the 9,572 journal citations in the study.

The authors assigned each of the 137 journals included in the core list a subject code based on the major subject for that journal. Subject codes provide a way of tracking the relative contribution of different disciplines to corporate governance research. Table 3 shows the subject distribution for the core journal list. The top subject areas represented by the journals citations are management, economics, finance, accounting, and corporate governance. They account for 82 percent of the journals and 94 percent of the total journal citations. None of the remaining subject categories (business news, law, news, psychology, or sociology) contribute more than 3 percent of the total citations. Citations to corporate governance journals are only 10 percent of the total journal citations. The distribution of citations in other than corporate governance journals is an indication of the interdisciplinary nature of corporate governance.

The corporate governance core list is shown the appendix. The entries in the list are the 137 titles that are cited at least once a year in five or more consecutive years of CGIR. They are arranged in descending order by number of citations. Among the top 50 titles, only 2 (CGIR and Directors and Boards) are corporate governance titles. In the entire list, only 6 corporate governance titles and CGIR account for almost 90 percent (656 of 737) of the citations in corporate governance publications. What is clear from this list is that the literature of corporate governance is concentrated within established business disciplines.

The appendix also includes the subject code for each journal and the column “Highly Ranked,” which is an indicator of whether the journal is considered top-tier in its respective field. Because the focus of this paper is developing a core list, including some indication of the relative importance of the journal in the authors’ list is important. As discussed earlier, core lists constructed in business colleges and departments may be focused on established disciplinary areas and ignore interdisciplinary areas. The goal with the “Highly Ranked” field is to provide an objective indication of journal quality based on the intersection of journal rankings described in Harzing’s Journal Quality List.⁵⁵ One strength of the JQL is that it collects journal-ranking studies from around the world and presents them side-by-side for comparison. Rankings come from a variety of sources, ranging from rankings done by individual institutions to those done as part of national journal-ranking initiatives. The current edition of JQL contains information from twenty-one different journal ranking studies dated 1998 to 2012.

To arrive at an assessment of quality journals in corporate governance, the authors selected three rankings (the Australian Business Deans Council Journal Rankings List (ABDC), the Association of Business Schools Academic Journal Quality Guide (ABS), and a list from the ESSEC Business School in Paris (ESSEC)) in the forty-fifth edition of the JQL. Each ranking has the advantage of being recent (two dated from 2010 and one from 2011), and all have broad journal coverage. The ABS ranking is used as an evaluative tool when conducting the UK Research Assessment Exercise. ABCD is a ranking developed by the Australian Business Deans Council after input from professional societies. ESSEC is the equivalent of an individual school ranking.

Journals included in the “Highly Ranked” column ranked in the top two categories (indicating that the journals have an international reputation) in all three rankings. The criteria for including journals were as follows: ABCD journals were included if their ranking was A* or A; ABS journals were included if their rankings were 4 or 3 (including the 4* titles); ESSEC journals were included if their rankings were 0 or 1 (including the 0+ journals). Triangulating between three different rankings insured that the included journals were ranked as top-tier journals in multiple rankings. In this core list, 46 percent (63) of 137 titles are identified as “Highly Ranked,” including the top 20 titles in the list.

Researchers need to be aware that the perceived quality of an individual research article tends to be tied to the quality of the journal in which it appears. Faculty members often make judgments regarding journal quality to make informed decisions about promotion and tenure and performance evaluations of their faculty colleagues. Faculty and administrators in academic institutions involved in making performance evaluations for both salary increases and promotion and tenure decisions need to exercise their subject expertise and professional judgment in conducting these evaluations. This paper potentially informs these types of decisions by indicating the core journals contributing to the field of corporate governance. Since corporate governance researchers may publish in a diverse set of academic disciplines, this paper is useful to faculty members on promotion and tenure committees and those who provide external letters of recommendation in terms of identifying the journals making the most important contributions to the development of the corporate governance field.

Therefore researchers interested in corporate governance employed in finance departments seeking promotion can claim that corporate governance research fits the mainstream of finance research in general. The same argument holds for economics, accounting, and management scholars. Governance researchers outside of business schools also will find these results useful in terms of where to submit their academic work.

The authors discussed earlier that corporate governance researchers are frequently affiliated with business departments whose publishing criteria may not match where the researcher is publishing. In this case, the core list is a useful tool for demonstrating that the core journals in corporate governance are highly respected journals in other disciplines. This information can be useful when justifying publishing outside of a department’s disciplinary journal lists.

Individual faculty also can take steps to ensure that their research is evaluated objectively by promotion and tenure committees and department administrators. One of the most important things that faculty can do is to find out how their department evaluates research outcomes during promotion and tenure cases. Particularly important is to find out if a disciplinary journal list exists, how the list compiled, how often is it updated, and who has input into the revision process. Also important is talking with promotion and tenure committees or recently promoted faculty to learn how journals that fall outside disciplinary lists are evaluated. The authors’ list of core journals constitutes a set of target outlets for all governance research that can supplement existing departmental journal lists.

Beyond finding acceptable publishing outlets and understanding how their department evaluates research, faculty also need to be able to show the impact of their research on their discipline, regardless of whether that discipline is corporate governance, a more standard business discipline, or a different interdisciplinary field. Tracking citations to research is particularly important and can demonstrate the impact of an individual article. A highly cited article in a second-tier journal can signal that the article is of particular importance and should be evaluated on its merits and not the (presumed) prestige of the journal.

This paper demonstrates the complexities of interdisciplinary fields, and librarians can leverage the information in this paper in a number of ways. One important lesson from this study is that interdisciplinary fields differ from traditional disciplines in the way they produce and use knowledge. Knowing that a field is interdisciplinary can inform both research assistance and collection management decisions. Integrating methods of searching for interdisciplinary information (e.g., using multiple databases) with traditional collection evaluation methods enhances the ability of librarians to meet the needs of their interdisciplinary scholars.

Another important task for librarians is assisting faculty in interdisciplinary areas, such as corporate governance, in defending their choice of publishing venues, especially in cases where publications fall outside a department’s disciplinary journal list. Educating faculty on ways to demonstrate the value of their articles despite their publication choice is important. One way to accomplish this is to emphasize that that journal rankings by themselves do not adequately represent the quality of individual articles. Singh, Haddad, and Chow point out that “using journal rank as a proxy for quality can lead to substantial judgment errors: Many top articles are published in non-top journals, and many non-top articles are published in top journals.”⁵⁶ Being familiar with the literature that critiques journal ranking may provide the evidence departments need to change their evaluation methods. Research that explores individually evaluating articles for merit has been done by Mingers, Watson, and Scaparra.⁵⁷

Another role of librarians is to educate faculty on the use and misuse of journal rankings. This may take the form of discussions with promotion and tenure committees or presentations at departmental meetings. Encouraging faculty and departments to judge research based on the impact of the article will enhance their ability to judge quality research. As Singh, Haddad, and Chow noted, “both administrators and the management discipline will be well served by efforts to evaluate each article on its merits rather than abdicate this responsibility by using journal ranking as a proxy for quality.”⁵⁸ Librarians should realize that educating faculty about journal rankings will be an ongoing discussion topic.

Collection management for corporate governance and other interdisciplinary areas is complicated by the need to examine literature in multiple subject areas. The references included in the literature review may assist librarians with interdisciplinary collection management challenges. The method used in this paper is transferrable and can be applied to any interdisciplinary subject area. It can be used for developing core lists that can be used for collection evaluation or for evaluating journal articles for promotion and tenure that are relevant regardless of discipline. The method also is useful for delineating the core subject areas that constitute an interdisciplinary subject.