Are Finance, Management, and Marketing Autonomous Fields of Scientific Research? An Analysis Based on Journal Citations

Although there is considerable consensus that Finance, Management, and Marketing are ‘science’, some debate remains with regard to whether these three areas comprise autonomous, organized and settled scientific research fields. In this paper we aim to explore this issue by analyzing the occurrence of citations in the top-ranked journals in the areas of Finance, Management, and Marketing. We put forward a modified version of the ‘network cluster’ as proposed by Klamer and Van Dalen (2002) and conclude that Finance is a ‘Relatively autonomous, organized and settled field of research’ whereas Management and (to a larger extent) Marketing are relatively non-autonomous and hybrid fields of research’. Complementary analysis based on sub-discipline rankings using the recursive methodology of Liebowitz and Palmer (1984) confirms the above conclusions.