The Evolving Social Network of Marketing Scholars

The interest in social networks among marketing scholars and practitioners has sharply increased in the last decade. One social network of which network scholars increasingly recognize the unique value is the academic collaboration (coauthor) network. We offer a comprehensive database of the collaboration network among marketing scholars over the last 40 years (available at http://mktsci.pubs.informs.org). Based on the ProQuest database, it documents the social collaboration among researchers in dozens of the leading marketing journals, enabling us to create networks of active marketing researchers. Unlike most of the published academic collaboration research, our database is dynamic and follows the evolution of the field over many years. In this paper, we describe the database and point to some basic network descriptives that lead to interesting research questions. We believe this database can be of much value to researchers interested in the evolution of social networks over time, as well as the specific evolution of the marketing discipline.