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Editorial: fifty years of Marketing Science.

Article Excerpt
We have observed conspicuous changes in the 25 years after Frank M. Bass, John D. C. Little, and Donald G. Morrison begot Marketing Science. Marketing Science benefited from five subsequent editors and fifty different area editors. New submissions grew from 40 to over 320. Published articles grew from 16 to over 45 per year. We discuss six possible developments for the next 25 years. (1) The Internet's extraordinary search capabilities will diminish the distinctiveness of each journal. (2) The Internet will allow any researcher to publish research without journals. (3) Faster dissemination is inevitable. (4) Many economical electronic journals will enter the market. (5) The business model of print journals must change. (6) We will publish new forms of content (e.g., videos, blogs, running reviews, and subsequent comments by the authors).

Key words: Marketing Science; electronic journals; print journals; citations; impact of the Internet

The Last Twenty-Five Years

In the early 1980s, Frank M. Bass and John D. C. Little ambitiously founded the INFORMS journal Marketing Science to provide a premiere outlet for rigorous research that applied management science methods to marketing problems (Morrison and Raju 2004).

At that time, there was a conspicuous need for another journal. Outlets for the application of management science to marketing problems were scarce. Management Science furnished inadequate space, and the Journal of Marketing Research focused more on statistical methodologies (Morrison 2001). Donald G. Morrison, who became the first editor of Marketing Science, chaired the committee that started the journal (Steckel and Brody 2001). Today, of course, Marketing Science publishes a wide-range of high-quality marketing articles (often reviewed by three or more experts), including articles providing applications of management science methods, new methodologies, quantitative analysis of marketing problems, advances in behavioral decision theory, econometrics, and new empirical findings.

In the brief twenty years since conception, Marketing Science became one of the leading marketing journals (Baumgartner and Pieters 2003, Mort et al. 2004, Bauerly and Johnson 2005, Polonsky et al. 2005, Polonsky and Mittelstaedt 2006). By 2004, Marketing Science was not only the most highly cited journal in marketing but also one of the three most cited journals in business, according to the 2004 Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). In 2006, Marketing Science was included on the list of journals used by the Financial Times for the ranking of research productivity at business schools.

From a modest circulation in the early 1980s, we have seen our subscriptions grow to include the libraries of every leading university. Of course, library subscriptions have diminished in importance with the remarkable growth of the Internet. Web-based aggregators and scientific portals now provide unprecedented electronic access to full-text, peer-reviewed articles (e.g., see Cohen 2006, Tenopir 2004). Marketing Science, focusing on broad circulation, has permitted nonexclusive access for most leading aggregators and integrated library service vendors, including Elto B. Stephens Company (EBSCO), Proquest (Bell and Howell), the nonprofit Journal Storage Project (JSTOR), and InfoTrac (Thomson-Gale). These aggregators not only offer full-text versions of our articles, but also they offer extraordinary (truly remarkable) search capabilities allowing users to execute complex searches for information in seconds that would have taken...