Is Microsoft Academic a viable citation source for ranking marketing journals?

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess the viability of the scholarly search engine Microsoft Academic (MA) as a citation source for evaluating/ranking marketing journals. Design/methodology/approach This study performs a comparison between MA and Google Scholar (GS) in terms of journal coverage, h-index values and journal rankings. Findings Findings indicate that: MA (vs GS) covers 96.80 percent (vs 97.87 percent) of the assessed 94 marketing-focused journals; the MA-based h-index exhibits values that are 35.45 percent lower than the GS-based h-index; and that the MA-based ranking and the GS-based ranking are highly consistent. Based on these findings, MA seems to constitute a rather viable citation source for assessing a marketing journal’s impact. Research limitations/implications This study focuses on one discipline, that is, marketing. Originality/value This study identifies some issues that would need to be fixed by the MA’s development team. It recommends some further enhancements with respect to journal title entry, publication year allocation and field classification. It also provides two up-to-date rankings for more than 90 marketing-focused journals based on actual cites (October 2018) of articles published between 2013 and 2017.