Scope and inclusion

The index covers research with a substantive theoretical or empirical contribution to marketing, selling, purchasing, customer value or exchange in organizational markets. Journal membership and article relevance are assessed separately. Records with unresolved identity holds and retracted articles are excluded from the displayed selection.

Publications and publication score

Publications counts each matching article once for a researcher, institution or group. Publication score divides one article equally among its authors: a four-author article gives each author 0.25. A group with two authors on that article receives 0.50. These are output measures; they do not directly measure article quality. Sorting changes the ranking; publication counts and publication scores remain visible together.

Relative position and author order

Top % is 100 × rank / the full ranked population within the active filters, rounded up to the next 0.1 percentage point. The denominator is not the displayed top 100, faculty size or the global researcher population. Equal output ranks share a percentage. Researcher rankings use stable researcher IDs; unresolved name-only records remain on publications. Average author position is the arithmetic mean of numbered positions on articles with valid, unambiguous author order. Its coverage appears when hovering over a value. Alphabetical authorship and disciplinary conventions mean that an earlier position need not indicate a larger contribution.

Automatic identity controls

Protected author-ID/name pairs are retained across imports. Every API authorship supplies its own ID and name; missing IDs receive a publication-scoped record rather than shifting the following authors. Conflicting names are recorded for review and affected articles are held from the ranking selection. The importer and dashboard launcher run integrity checks; direct database name overwrites are blocked by persistent database rules. Source metadata is not thereby independently verified. Correction reports are saved separately for editorial review and never change indexed records automatically.

University attribution

Institutions receive credit from the authors' publication-time affiliations. Where an author has several unordered source affiliations, their share is divided equally among those institutions. Missing author-to-institution links receive no inferred credit. “Contributing authors” counts identified authors with matching publications; it is not faculty size.

Affiliation quality and corrections

Author-specific affiliation lists can be corrupted in source metadata. The attribution audit detects articles where every author receives the same list of multiple institutions. Such lists are treated as ambiguous rather than as verified author affiliations. They remain available as article-level institutional presence, but do not create author-specific institutional credit. Publisher-confirmed corrections take priority. The big-whale sales article (DOI 10.1177/00222429211037336) has been corrected using the authors' affiliation statement in the published version.

This is a targeted ambiguity screen, not an independent verification of every author affiliation. Raw metadata is retained; audit flags and publisher corrections are stored separately and can be rebuilt from the source snapshots.

AJG fields and world map

Disciplines follow the journal's AJG subject-field code. They describe the journal's field, not an inferred topic or discipline of each individual article. Country metadata comes from the publication-time institutions embedded in the source records. The map counts each article once per country and once per region represented. Internationally coauthored articles can therefore appear in several countries and regions. Regional counts are deduplicated within each region. Missing country metadata is shown separately.

Country outlines and label locations are from Natural Earth (public domain). Map markers represent countries and territories, not the geographic addresses of universities. The discipline and journal filters apply to all landscape views.

Faculty and per-capita comparison

Institutional faculty-size and per-capita rankings require a maintained roster with named members, eligibility rules, source URLs and a snapshot date. A future registry must distinguish current faculty portfolios from output produced while affiliated with an institution. No faculty count is inferred from the authors found in publications. Faculty-dependent columns will be introduced when the corresponding rosters are available.

Groups, scores per member and saved peers

Custom groups use the explicitly selected member list, including members without matching publications. Score per member divides the group's publication score by that member count. The benchmark index equals 100 times group A's score per member divided by group B's, with group B set to 100. It is unavailable when the required denominators are missing or the reference score is zero. Selected rosters are not historical employment records or FTE measures.

Multiple named peer clusters can be saved locally and reused across browser visits. These lists stay in this browser on this device; clearing browser storage removes them. Scores are recalculated against the current filters and database when a comparison runs.

Topics and research connections

Each group's top five topics is selected independently by article count, with alphabetical tie-breaking. Repeated tags on one article count once. Topic coverage is shown; articles can have multiple topics, so percentages can exceed 100% in total. Topic labels are derived from available metadata and can be corrected. Shared top-five labels describe thematic overlap, not shared publications.

The collaboration view starts with an explicitly selected researcher and lists their coauthors within the active filters. A shared article counts once for each collaborator; these partner counts overlap on multi-author articles. The diagram displays up to 40 collaborators and the table includes all identified collaborators. Positions are for display and do not represent conceptual distance.

Coverage, sources and updates

The database combines OpenAlex metadata, the selected journal catalogue and classification records. Import coverage, author identity resolution, topic tagging and article-level assessment can differ across journals and years. The original pilot is retained alongside subsequent imports. Historical single-review and automated decisions remain distinguishable in the database; changing the interface does not convert them into independent verification.

Publication counts reflect the indexed selection and the active filters. Citation totals are omitted from rankings because a regularly maintained citation snapshot is not part of this release. The current calendar year is incomplete. Journal-list definitions and rating editions are retained as separate source fields.

Corrections

Use “Suggest a publication” to report a missing article or request a correction by DOI. Requests are reviewed before the indexed record changes. Full-text PDFs are not redistributed.