Non-western contexts: the invisible half

Like many other disciplines within the broad area of social sciences (e.g., anthropology, gender studies, psychology, sociology, etc.), consumer research is also highly navigated by scholars from Western countries. This, however, does not mean, by any means, that consumer research is devoted to studying Western contexts only. As evident from the ever-increasing number of regional conferences (e.g., Asia-Pacific and Latin American conferences of the Association for Consumer Research) and non-Western students' enrolment in doctoral programs at Western universities, there are many more researchers (from non-Western countries) who are entering the field and enriching it by their colourful contributions. Yet, given the low number of publications on consumer research in non-Western contexts, it seems that our current knowledge in these societies has a long way to go to flourish. More specifically, and in the domain of consumption culture research, this gap is even further widened by the fact that the culture of consumption in such contexts is largely interpreted with reference to the 'grand narratives' of Western scholars (e.g., Foucault, Mafessoli, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Derrida, etc.). Therefore, from an ontological perspective, it seems that our existing knowledge about non-Western societies lies heavily on the 'theoretical structures' that are 'constructed' by Western philosophy as a set of ideas, beliefs, and practices (Said, 1978). As Belk (1995) reminds us, consumption culture always existed in all human societies. What makes contemporary societies different from that of our predecessors' is not the fact that consumption culture did not exist in those societies, but that consumption culture has become a prevailing feature in modern society (Slater, 1997; Lury, 1996; Fırat and Venkatesh, 1995; McCracken, 1988). Therefore, the nature and dynamics of consumption culture in each society should be studied not only against the sociocultural, historical, and economic background of a given context (Western or non-Western) but also with reference to the philosophical and epistemological viewpoints that analyse and interpret cultural practices of that society from within that culture. Addressing such issues, this paper discusses some of the key reasons for lack of theory development in the field from non-western contexts. The paper invites scholars in non-Western contexts to introduce the less articulated, and sometime hidden, body of knowledge from their own contexts into the field of marketing in general and consumer research in particular

Microsoft Academic: A multidisciplinary comparison of citation counts with Scopus and Mendeley for 29 journals

Microsoft Academic is a free citation index that allows large scale data collection. This combination makes it useful for scientometric research. Previous studies have found that its citation counts tend to be slightly larger than those of Scopus but smaller than Google Scholar, with disciplinary variations. This study reports the largest and most systematic analysis so far, of 172,752 articles in 29 large journals chosen from different specialisms. From Scopus citation counts, Microsoft Academic citation counts and Mendeley reader counts for articles published 2007-2017, Microsoft Academic found a slightly more (6%) citations than Scopus overall and especially for the current year (51%). It found fewer citations than Mendeley readers overall (59%), and only 7% as many for the current year. Differences between journals were probably due to field preprint sharing cultures or journal policies rather than broad disciplinary differences

Confidence intervals for normalised citation counts: Can they delimit underlying research capability?

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Elsevier in Journal of Informetrics on 24/10/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2017.09.002 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Normalised citation counts are routinely used to assess the average impact of research groups or nations. There is controversy over whether confidence intervals for them are theoretically valid or practically useful. In response, this article introduces the concept of a group’s underlying research capability to produce impactful research. It then investigates whether confidence intervals could delimit the underlying capability of a group in practice. From 123120 confidence interval comparisons for the average citation impact of the national outputs of ten countries within 36 individual large monodisciplinary journals, moderately fewer than 95% of subsequent indicator values fall within 95% confidence intervals from prior years, with the percentage declining over time. This is consistent with confidence intervals effectively delimiting the research capability of a group, although it does not prove that this is the cause of the results. The results are unaffected by whether internationally collaborative articles are included