The purpose of this paper is to see whether it is possible to reliably detect, prospectively, superior intellectual contributions to marketing's literature.
Citation data accessed on the Institute of Scientific Information Web of Science were used to examine the impact of award‐winning marketing articles with those of lead articles and non‐lead articles in the same journal issues.
Award‐winners gathered more citations than those for the two comparison groups. It is shown, however, that this finding should not be taken for granted. The peer review system frequently fails to identify high quality, innovative research.
The paper only considers US marketing journals.
This is the only in‐depth study of the impact of award‐winning research in the marketing community.
