Tell Me Where You Belong, I Might Cite Your Work: Affiliation Origins, Legitimation Efforts, and the Citation of Team-Produced Research in Business and Management Scholarship

Abstract

Drawing from the country-of-origin literature, this study theorizes the effect of academic affiliation origins on the academic impact of knowledge produced by teams of researchers. Our econometric analysis employing more than 65,000 peer-reviewed articles published from 1997 to 2012 in business and management journals reveals that the higher the share of co-authors with peripheral affiliations (i.e. the proportion of authors in a research team not affiliated with a US or UK institution), the lower is the number of citations their articles receive on average. Despite the globalization of knowledge production, the results show that scholars’ geographic location still plays an influential role in knowledge diffusion processes, conditioning gains, or setbacks with respect to the academic impact of their work. We further show that scholars on the periphery of global scholarship can reduce this negative effect by developing ‘targeting’ and ‘framing’ legitimation efforts reflected in the composition of the team they are part of and in the positioning of the knowledge it produces.