Commentary: Relative Presence of Business-to-Business Research in the Marketing Literature: Review and Future Directions

The structure and evolution of business-to-business marketing: A citation and co-citation analysis

“…The selection of the B2B journals reflected their frequent characterization as leading journals in the field and their coverage of both applied and theoretical research (LaPlaca, 2008;Lichtenthal & Mummalaneni, 2009). Similar to LaPlaca's (2008) study, all articles from these journals appear in the investigation.…”

“…Second, a significant proportion of articles in these periods did not cite any other article and thus could not be included in the study. Most of those articles were case-related studies; due to their applied focus, no references were needed, as was characteristic of the early stages of the case research tradition in B2B marketing (Lichtenthal & Mummalaneni, 2009). Any references without a specified author were removed from the analysis, such as statistical documents, publications by institutions, or articles in popular magazines.…”

Reply: Assessing B2B Research in the Marketing Literature: Focus versus Relevance

“…Complemented by the insightful ideas of Lichtenthal and Mummalaneni (2009) and Malhotra and Uslay (2009), there seems to be a clear path forward in the development of B2B scholarship. Collectively, these three articles can be seen as a near manifesto for the subfield of B2B research.…”

“…Collectively, these three articles can be seen as a near manifesto for the subfield of B2B research. Nonetheless, there are clearly both practical (Lichtenthal and Mummalaneni 2009) and conceptual issues (Malhotra and Uslay 2009) to overcome.…”

“…In fact, one can see from Figures 7 and 8 (LaPlaca and Kartichis 2009) that, while there was more published B2B research in recent years than in earlier years for all of the major categories of research, research focusing on relationships between industrial companies began in the late 1970s and has accelerated during the We would like to express our gratitude for the encouragement and support of the editor and the anonymous reviewers who assisted with the development of the article (LaPlaca and Katrichis 2009), and to the three sets of authors (Lichtenthal and Mummalaneni 2009;Malhotra and Uslay 2009;Dant and Brown 2009) for their thoughtful and insightful commentary on that article. It is particularly gratifying to see such esteemed colleagues taking an interest in our work.…”