Administrative Science
Quarterly is a generalist journal covering a wide range of research on
organizations, as you can see in its invitation to contributors. One might
think this would make it less influential in any particular topic, but this is
not true. The leading generalist journals are more prestigious than
specialized journals, and as a result they get top quality papers, especially
if those papers are meant to have wide impact. This gives them more readers,
and readers who pay more attention. Equally important, generalist journals are
places that assemble papers with multiple ideas that can cross-fertilize fields
of study. Often they are the places to look for ideas that will grow and
rejuvenate fields.
So is that true for ASQ and strategy? A paper by Sridhar Nerur, Abdul Rasheed, and Alankrita Pandey looks at how strategy developed over time, focusing on research in Strategic Management Journal and journals that cited it, or were cited by it. This inflates the influence of SMJ a bit, but is fair enough because SMJ is the leading specialist strategy journal. Next they looked at citations between journals staggered in time periods. These changed over time, as strategy research took shape, but I think that the figure below is a good example because it shows 1995-1999, which was a time period in which the strategy field nearly had its current shape.
Notice that there are two-way arrows between the leading
generalist journals ASQ and AMJ (Academy of Management Journal), and ASQ and
ASR (American Sociological Review). Other than that, all the arrows show
journals learning more from ASQ than ASQ learns from them – they are one-way
arrows (the arrows point in the direction of citations, so an arrow into a
journal means a citation to the journal, which is the same as acknowledging influence from the journal). Interestingly,
in this time period, there is no direct influence from ASQ to SMJ, so we cannot
see ASQ shaping strategy directly, but we can track indirect influences such as
ASQ to ResPol (Research Policy) to SMJ. This pattern of indirect influence
started in 1990; before that ASQ directly influenced strategy.
Does this mean that ASQ was a starting point that lost
influence? Not at all. In fact, all these journals cite each other, so the
graph just shows the highest-volume citation paths. When adding up the direct and indirect influence, the total influence
can be found, and Nerur, Rasheed, and Pandey show that ASQ maintained a top 3
rank as a source of new strategy knowledge in all time periods except
1985-1989. They also show a broader point—in the top 5 most influential
journals in strategy, only one was a specialist: SMJ.
So we know that ASQ is influential in strategy, but it is
not a strategy journal. It is a prestigious generalist journal, which makes it
influential in many fields.
Nerur, S., Rasheed, A. A., &
Pandey, A. 2016. Citation footprints on the sands of time: An analysis of idea
migrations in strategic management. Strategic Management Journal,
37(6): 1065-1084.