Disciplinary knowledge diffusion in business research

Business research has established itself in largely six disciplines: Accounting, Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Management, Finance, Management Science and Operations Research, and Management Information Systems. The knowledge flows among these six disciplines and the factors that drive knowledge diffusion are important considerations. The quantitative analyses on a large dataset containing over 400,000 journal-to-journal citations for business journals published between 1997 and 2009 reveal important patterns of knowledge diffusion in business research. The cross-disciplinary knowledge diffusion is discipline-dependent and converging to a similar level in terms of the diversity. Aside from other factors such as articles published in the journal and the number of classifications, we find that journal quality, as measured by inclusion in the UT Dallas top journal list, has a significant effect on cross-disciplinary knowledge flows. We also offer some potential explanations for the effect of this formalized measure of quality.