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Introduction
The first issue of a new journal, devoted to business and industrial marketing, was originally scheduled for 1985. However, due to some unforeseen delays, the inaugural issue of the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing (JBIM) was published in 1986. Recently, with the publication of Volume 10 Number 4 1995, the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing celebrated an important anniversary - ten years of providing a publication outlet for articles focussing on timely and important topics in the area of business and industrial marketing.
We thought it appropriate to commemorate this important anniversary by examining the articles published in JBIM over the past ten years and presenting our findings to JBIM's readers and contributors. Thus, this article provides an overview of the journal's history, contributions and content, along with some interesting summary statistics. In addition, this article outlines JBIM's past and present objectives, as well as its current positioning, recent developments and future directions.
Origins
As with most journals, the early years are best characterized as a continuous struggle to increase both manuscript submissions and subscribers. Fortunately, both efforts were successful and now, after ten years of publication, JBIM is established as a leading journal in the field of business-to-business marketing - a leading area of marketing thought in terms of scholarly research and practical importance. Over the past ten years, 199 articles have been published in 29 issues. These articles have been a mixture of conceptual, empirical, commentary and case study (see Table I) - covering a wide variety of marketing-related issues. Over the past several years, the journal has been published four times a year. However, in 1995, five issues were published and, starting in 1996, six issues of JBIM will be published annually. All articles submitted to JBIM for publication are double blind refereed, and about one-third of the manuscripts submitted are judged (by the editorial reviewers) to be of sufficient quality and interest to readers to be accepted for publication.
From its inception, JBIM's mission has been to disseminate new information - through publications - to increase the marketing sophistication of the sellers of business and industrial products and services beyond their current state-of-the-art practice. Or, as presented in the inaugural publisher's statement, JBIM was to be "... a...