Home bias effect in the management literature

This paper examines the possible home bias in the citation of the 300 most-cited articles in selected management journals between 2005 and 2009. The management journals chosen for the study were the ten with the greatest average impact over the last 5 years. The theoretical framework was built on: the theory of asymmetric information furnished by Financial Economics; contributions in the bibliometric field which indicate geographical bias in the scientific community’s citation patterns, and the notion of paradigm, employed in the Sociology of Science field. The data from the sample provide empirical evidence of a home bias in the citation pattern of the papers analysed. Here, home bias is defined as the positive difference between the percentage of a country’s self-citations minus the average number of citations of the same nation’s work by the remaining countries surveyed.