Looking at the last years of publications is not backward; it is strategically forward-facing. By examining the publications of the last six years, it is possible to see trends in topics, methodology, authors and impact, which are evidence of a conscious intellectual evolution. This is an opportune reflection for JBIM, because the Editors of the Journal have changed. The last few years have corresponded to industrial market shifts due to digitalisation, geopolitical change, sustainability pressures and reconfiguration of global value chains (White et al., 2025; Zhenmin and Espinosa, 2019; Mora Cortez and Johnston, 2017). These editorial challenges reflect the recent trend in publications and investigate the research that this journal has published, whether it is proportionate to the world changing. Journals not only observe the field; they shape it. This Editorial can initiate a discussion on the nature of industrial marketing scholarship sought by the journal.
In doing so, this involved not only an understanding of how many articles are published but also what type of research they were, and who was producing them, which is not a common bibliometric process but also a reflection on the intellectual climate of industrial marketing scholarship. Authorship patterns and geographic concentration have a dynamic influence on reality to be studied, the industrial contexts to which this reality is attributed, and the theory. Where scholarship is generated repeatedly from a small number of regions, institutions, or methodological traditions, the danger is intellectual bias; that is, the complex and heterogeneous industrial markets are interpreted through ever narrower lenses. Additionally, what is observed and measured will be shaped by a methodological approach, and who will be visible in the field through their experiences, practices, and institutional arrangements. These questions address the essence of relevance, authentic knowledge and the future directions of the field. Think about editorial boundary setting and strategic decisions about what conversations are amplified and what conversations are kept on the side.
JBIM plays a special role in this respect, as it helps to define the criteria for the creation, assessment and dissemination of knowledge about industrial marketing. It is, therefore, this Editorial’s wish to be more reflexive in terms of volume, voice and method, and to acknowledge the cumulative effects of editorial and review practices. JBIM can continue to champion methodological pluralism, cross-regional collaboration, and theoretically ambitious work, which will make it a rigorous and inclusive, globally contextual, and future-oriented industrial market force.
To support these reflections with evidence, the sections that follow provide a systematic examination of publication patterns (Morrison, 2010). By analysing trends in publication volume, authorship structures, citation dynamics, methodological positioning, selection of topics, and geographic distribution, we offer an empirically informed perspective on how the field is evolving in practice.
How many, from where, what topics and methodology?
How many papers and authors?
According to our analysis, since January 2020, 1064 articles have been published in the Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing. The analysis was conducted on articles published on the Scopus data set from January 1 2020, to January 28 2026.
The longitudinal patterns indicated in Table 1 suggest significant changes in the publication process and academic work over time. The total number of articles published annually is consistent over time (1,064 articles in total), but the average number of authors per article has increased over time, from 2.86 in 2020–3.16 in 2025. Overall, this trend points towards more collaborative research approaches and seems to reflect the fact that research questions are becoming increasingly complex, that multimethod designs are becoming more common, and that research and development are becoming more international and/or cross-institutional. The citations are down, but this is expected over the past few years, as it takes time to establish citations. JBIM has remained a steady stream of contributions and growing collaborative scholarship.
Where do the authors come from?
The distribution of publications at the regional level was used to reveal the strengths and the emerging imbalances of the field of industrial marketing scholarship for the period 2020–2025. Europe and Asia still lead the knowledge base, but there are opposing trends between these two regions (see Table 2). The proportion of Europe is decreasing (33%), and it is unclear if this leadership position can be sustained. In contrast, Asia demonstrates steady growth (31%), indicating a shift in the intellectual centre of gravity in industrial marketing research, both due to growing research capacity and due to a growing interest in international scholarly debates. For JBIM, this evolution presents an opportunity and a responsibility to achieve a more globally balanced scenario. The journal is well-positioned to encourage deeper theoretical integration across regions and support voices from underrepresented contexts such as Africa, the Middle East, and Oceania. Doing so will be critical to ensuring that future development reflects the diversity of industrial markets.
Authors’ countries of origin
| Region | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2020–25 | % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | 7 | 4 | 5 | 9 | 8 | 13 | 46 | 1.83 |
| America (US/Canada) | 96 | 59 | 53 | 60 | 91 | 73 | 432 | 17.23 |
| America (other countries) | 17 | 19 | 35 | 13 | 12 | 22 | 118 | 4.71 |
| Asia | 116 | 68 | 123 | 138 | 169 | 157 | 771 | 30.75 |
| Europe | 170 | 152 | 145 | 156 | 99 | 114 | 836 | 33.35 |
| Middle East | 23 | 12 | 13 | 22 | 13 | 8 | 91 | 3.63 |
| Oceania | 48 | 15 | 24 | 28 | 40 | 13 | 168 | 6.70 |
| Others (more than one region) | 7 | 3 | 6 | 13 | 12 | 4 | 45 | 1.79 |
| Total | 484 | 332 | 404 | 439 | 444 | 404 | 2507 | 100 |
What topics?
The next question is about what has been published: what are the topics that grab more attention? Using the keywords, a co-occurrence analysis was undertaken using the software VOSviewer (Van Eck and Waltman, 2010). The keyword co-occurrence network in Figure 1 includes keywords that occurred at least ten times, resulting in a total of 3292 terms that were organised in five groups.
The network contains multiple connected keyword clusters with larger nodes for frequently represented terms. Business is a major node linked with business marketing, innovation performance, commitment, trust, relationship quality, relationship marketing and buyer supplier relationship. Capability is another major node linked with resource, firm performance, export performance, new product development and cooperation. Sustainability connects with servitization, corporate social responsibility and nearby interaction-related terms. Interaction is linked with bibliometric analysis, digital transformation and several neighbouring keywords. Sales connects with artificial intelligence, sales performance and sales management. Supply chain finance is linked with China, S M E and supply chain resilience. Numerous connecting lines extend between these groups, indicating relationships among keywords across the network.Keyword co-occurrence
The network contains multiple connected keyword clusters with larger nodes for frequently represented terms. Business is a major node linked with business marketing, innovation performance, commitment, trust, relationship quality, relationship marketing and buyer supplier relationship. Capability is another major node linked with resource, firm performance, export performance, new product development and cooperation. Sustainability connects with servitization, corporate social responsibility and nearby interaction-related terms. Interaction is linked with bibliometric analysis, digital transformation and several neighbouring keywords. Sales connects with artificial intelligence, sales performance and sales management. Supply chain finance is linked with China, S M E and supply chain resilience. Numerous connecting lines extend between these groups, indicating relationships among keywords across the network.Keyword co-occurrence
Five main groups were identified from the analysis:
relational foundations of value creation in B2B markets;
capabilities, resources and performance;
sales, AI, and technology-enabled interaction;
sustainability, CSR, and Servitisation; and
contextual and supply chain perspectives, which are presented in Table 3.
Research groups
| Groups | Keywords | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| Blue (Relational Foundations of Value Creation in B2B Markets) | Business, trust, commitment, relationship quality and marketing, buyer–supplier relationship, value creation, coopetition | Foundational relationship in industrial marketing, where trust and commitment enable the creation of long-term relational value within interconnected businesses. networks |
| Green (capabilities, resources, and performance) | Capability, resource, firm and export performance, innovation, new product development, market orientation, opportunism | Integration of resource-based and dynamic capability perspectives, linking relational and organisational capabilities to innovation and firm performance outcomes |
| Red (sales, AI, and Technology-Enabled interaction) | Interaction, sales, sales performance and sales management, digital transformation, artificial intelligence | Reconceptualises sales and interaction as digitally enabled, technology-mediated boundary-spanning processes shaping B2B performance |
| Yellow (sustainability, CSR, and servitisation) | Sustainability, corporate social responsibility, servitisation Interaction, business model | Connection between sustainability and CSR |
| Purple (contextual and supply chain perspectives) | SME, China, supply chain finance, supply chain resilience | Context-driven empirical extensions, applying relational and capability-based frameworks to SMEs, emerging economies, and supply chain challenges |
The keyword co-occurrence network shows a well-structured picture in the industrial marketing literature, which is based on a core relationship and several themed extensions. The classical and more recent industrial relations streams (capability, digital, and sustainability) are connected by the most central concepts such as business, trust, and interaction. This structure is based on cumulative evolution, which adds new themes to existing relational perspectives, not replacing them.
The blue group is dominated by the traditions of relationship marketing, with trust, commitment, relationship quality and buyer–supplier relationships as the key value-creation mechanisms. The green group is closely related to this group and is concerned with capacity and performance and relates firm resources and innovation capabilities to performance outcomes. The linkages between the blue and green groups are strong, reflecting the continued linkage of performance explanations in industrial marketing to relational and network integration.
For sales, boundary-spanning roles and interaction processes, a separate red interaction and sales-group emphasises the increased importance of these processes, which are influenced increasingly by digital transformation and AI. This group represents a new direction in industrial marketing, focusing on the reconfiguration of inter-firm interaction, decision-making, and performance at the boundary between firms by digital technologies.
The yellow sustainability group, in turn, represents a relational and value co-creation normative and strategic stream in which sustainability, CSR and Servitisation are defined as interrelated value co-creation and relational mechanisms, not as compliance issues. This implies greater emphasis on interaction and capability studies.
Finally, but not least, the contextual purple group draws from empirical extensions of industrial marketing theory in specific contexts like SMEs, China, supply chain finance and supply chain resiliency. These studies adapt established relational and capability frameworks to diverse institutional and geographic contexts, strengthening the industrial marketing tradition of empirically grounded research.
Papers that attracted more attention?
We also identified the articles that received the most citations based on Scopus. The papers with a larger number of citations are presented below in Table 4.
Most cited papers
| Year | Title | No. of citations | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Servitisation and digitalisation in manufacturing: the influence on firm performance | 216 | (Martín-Peña et al., 2020) |
| 2021 | Knowledge management, customer relationship management and innovation capabilities | 140 | (Migdadi, 2021) |
| 2022 | Artificial intelligence in customer relationship management: literature review and future research directions | 137 | (Ledro et al., 2022) |
| 2023 | A review of coopetition and future research agenda | 88 | (Meena et al., 2023) |
| 2024 | The different shades of innovation emergence in smart service systems: the case of italian cluster for aerospace technology | 63 | (Troisi et al., 2024) |
| 2025 | Understanding the relationship between coopetition and startups’ resilience: the role of entrepreneurial ecosystem and dynamic exchange capability | 25 | (Zhang and Li, 2025) |
(*) by January 28
What methodology?
The last part of looking backward is the analysis of methodology. We acknowledge that selecting a paper methodological approach is a difficult task, affected by several external (e.g., new emerging tools) and internal (e.g., capability and philosophy of science beliefs) factors. Several authors suggest best practices for different approaches (e.g., see Piekkari et al., 2010; Cabanelas et al., 2025).
Table 5 reveals a clear and persistent methodological imbalance in the industrial marketing literature over the period 2020–2025. There is a predominance of quantitative research (51% of all published articles), and the volumes of these articles have been relatively stable over the six years. But 2021 was different, which may relate to the outcomes of COVID-19. This indicates a high and long-term preference for designs that are hypothesis-driven and continues the trend of methodological familiarity and review certainty in the field.
Research groups
| Year | Literature or grey review | Quantitative | Qualitative | Conceptual | Analytical |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 19 | 100 | 64 | 19 | 8 |
| 2021 | 11 | 59 | 63 | 5 | 10 |
| 2022 | 11 | 91 | 39 | 7 | 10 |
| 2023 | 21 | 97 | 59 | 2 | 14 |
| 2024 | 23 | 93 | 42 | 11 | 19 |
| 2025 | 14 | 99 | 51 | 1 | 4 |
| Total | 99 | 539 | 318 | 45 | 65 |
| Percentage | 9 | 51 | 30 | 4 | 6 |
(*) Some papers use mixed methods; viewpoints and editorials are not considered
Qualitative research is in a secondary position, accounting for 30% of publications. Also, its level of stability across years is relatively low, suggesting it has gained legitimacy within industrial marketing scholarship but on a smaller scale.
Conceptual research only accounts for 4% of all the articles published and is clearly in decline over the past few years. Interestingly, this is interesting for a field that historically positioned itself as theory-driven and conceptually rich.
Literature and grey reviews account for 9% of publications and show that the synthesis is becoming increasingly recognised as a scholarly contribution but is still not widely recognised. The low proportion suggests that reviews are not yet fully embraced as an important part of the research process to structure knowledge and inform future research, and that the field still has a significant amount of primary empirical output.
Finally, analytical methods represent 6%. They include tools (e.g., DEMATEL, CoCoSo, AHP, BWM, ELECTRE IV, MICMAC), techniques (e.g., Survival Analysis, Social Network Analysis, Critical Incident Technique, Topic Modelling); models (e.g., Stackelberg Model, Game-Theoretical Model, Nash Equilibrium, Discrete Choice Models, Optimisation Models); algorithms (e.g., ANN, Naïve Bayes) and methods/approaches (e.g., fsQCA, TISM, Industrial Network Approach, Bionic Engineering Approach). For JBIM, this raises an editorial challenge about how to preserve quantitative research while more actively encouraging qualitative depth, conceptual innovation, the use of other analytical methods/approaches and integrative review work.
A potential future
This Editorial began as an exploratory exercise to understand what JBIM has published over the past six years and the outcomes that have emerged. These patterns show signals of shifts in how industrial marketing knowledge is being produced, by whom, and from where. One unusual development is the steady increase in the average number of authors per paper, which raises the uncomfortable but necessary questions:
Are we witnessing richer collaboration and intellectual integration, or the growing institutional pressures of co-authorship, scale, and internationalisation shaping publication behaviour?
The data also have an equally fascinating geographical story to tell. The trend of increasing output in Asia is ongoing, pointing not at a temporary shift but at a rebalancing of the intellectual geography of JBIM. To become relevant at the global level and not just in the region, JBIM needs to ask itself an important question:
How can it actively promote a more balanced and inclusive distribution of intellectual leadership across the continents?
Thematically, relational foundations and value creation continue to be the focus of industrial marketing scholarship and are thematically central, further emphasising the importance of interaction, exchange, and relationships. Meanwhile, capabilities, resources and performance remain important. However, these well-known principles are becoming increasingly joined by newer ones of digital technologies and sustainability. These new fields are not displacing the traditional fields; rather, they are changing them.
Context is now being pushed to the centre of analysis, where it was previously considered a sub-optimal element. With the geographical centre of authorship in constant upheaval, context is not just a control variable anymore, but it is a big source of theoretical insight. This poses a basic question for the field:
Can industrial marketing continue to rely on decontextualised explanations, or must it embrace contextual richness as a driver of theory development?
Finally, while conceptual and geographical movements are present, there is still a lack of methodological variations. The quantitative studies still dominate JBIM with over 50% of published papers. In the study of complex phenomena like ecosystems, coopetition, digital service systems and resilience, methodological pluralism might not be an option anymore, but a necessity in the field of industrial marketing research.
