Journal titles and mission statements: Lexical structure, diversity, and readability in business, management and accounting research

Abstract

There is an established research agenda on dissecting an article’s components and their association with a journal’s prestige. However, journals’ titles and their overview, aim and scope (i.e. journal’s mission statement – JMS(s)) have not been investigated with the same diligence. This study aims to conduct a comprehensive outlook of titles and JMSs’ lexical structure and identify significant differences between journals prestige and type of access and their JMS content in the field of business, management and accounting (BMA), considering the field’s experience in developing and applying mission statements. Titles and JMSs’ structural analysis reflected current and critical discussion in BMA: a predilection for counterintuitive findings and information and communication technology (ICT) tools. JMSs expressed primarily target customers and markets. JMSs from reputable journals showed a higher betweenness for key-terms related to rigorous features. In contrast, JMSs of lower reputable journals highlighted indexing attributes. The Wilcoxon rank-sum and the Kruskal–Wallis tests showed significant differences in the JMSs’ median diversity regarding the journal’s type of access and best quartiles.