Does the Centrality Degree of Latin American Countries Predict their Citation BasedPerformance on Management Research?

The aim of this paper is to determine if the centrality degree and density of Latin- American and Caribbean countries (LA-C) predicts their citation based performance in academic research in the management discipline. For our analysis, we use publication data of the Social Science Citation Index in the field of ‘‘Management’’ between 1988 and 2013, extracted from ISI Web of Science. The resulting database contained 1,079 articles reflecting the contributions of 19 LA-C countries. For the quantitative analysis we used a combination of Bibliometric and Social Networks Analysis techniques. To test the hypothesis a Multiple Linear Regression model with bootstrapping was run. The results show that the centrality degree of LA-C countries is positively associated to their citation based performance. The centrality degree of LA-C countries predicts a 54% of variance in their citation based research performance within the management discipline.