Are scientific articles involving corporations associated with higher citations and views? an analysis of the top journals in business research

Corporations face complex and interesting trade-offs when choosing to publish their papers. Unlike previous studies focusing on corporate publications in the natural sciences, this study focuses for the first time on the business field, exploring the relationship of corporate involvement on publications. We define the top business journals using the FT 50 journal list and collect the bibliographic records of these journals from the Scopus database for the years 2000 through 2019, manually screening them to identify 1599 corporate publications and a 1:2 control group. Our results show that the number of corporate publications has tended to decrease year by year and that publications with corporate involvement receive fewer citation and view counts than non-corporate publications. Further, we analyse a subsample of corporate publications and find that corporate publications with university (especially top university) collaboration have higher citation and view counts than other corporate publications. The inverse U -shaped relationship is seen between the number of universities and the citation and view counts. Our study provides evidence of the negative relationship between corporate involvement and citation and view counts for publications in the business field.