TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF THE ASIAN ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL (AAMJ): INTELLECTUAL STRUCTURE MAPPING AND BIBLIOMETRIC REVIEW

In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Asian Academy of Management Journal (AAMJ), this study presents a general overview on the publication structure of the journal from 1996 to 2019. The study identifies the most productive authors, universities, and countries mainly using the Scopus database. It also enlists the most cited documents of the journal. Besides, the study graphically maps the intellectual structure based on co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and co-occurrence of authors’ keywords. The findings show the prominent Asian profile of the journal where most of the contributions come from the Asian countries and the universities. Specifically, authors from Malaysia and India remain the most frequent contributors. These findings provide readers of AAMJ with an objective overview of the trends of the journal. The study may be useful for future contributors as it provides inputs for the future research agenda.


INTRODUCTION
The first decade of the 20th century experienced scientific contributions in management and gradually developed to multidisciplinary theories. It is observed that globalisation, access to the information and technology have changed the game rules where the fragile academic environment seems getting stiffed day by day with more pressure to remain at the abreast of the competitive institutes (Smither et al., 2016). Further, publication of research articles has remained to be one of the primary academic activities that make a difference and primarily caused academic institutes to push staff and students for continuous research and publishing. On the other hand, variety, growth, numbers, and nature of journals have also triggered a competitive situation among related stakeholders, for example researchers, authors, reviewers, editors, managers, institutes, and countries. It is also observed over the period of time that when one area of management gets researched up to maturity level, other connecting areas of research are explored, which enable publishing moves on to the next level (Ramos-Rodríguez & Ruíz-Navarro, 2004).
It is observed that a handful collection of publishing become the bases for the new horizon of research that instigates testing and development of theories and models where researchers start inventing extended models, amalgamation, novelty, and invention. The study of this "advancement" in a chronological way becomes significant to ensure the understanding in refining stages of the concepts, models, and of the most influential studies, authors, areas, and keywords. This knowing helps researchers in setting their future research directions, readers to understand the evolving steps of specific areas and management of journals to reset or revise the scope of their work, and further inculcation of expansion in publishing scope. One of the primary techniques for doing this exercise is termed as "bibliometric analysis" in the field of research and publishing.
Bibliometric analysis equips readers and researchers for explorations with an understanding of growth, changes, and research streams in specific fields. Diodato and Gellatly (2013) highlighted that in bibliometric studies, certain quantitative techniques are applied to analyse large volumes of documentation (Diodato & Gellatly, 2013;Nawaz et al., 2020), it is a field of "information and libraries sciences" (Bar-Ilan, 2008), quantitative method of bibliographies (Broadus, 1987) are used for screening and cataloging general research trends related to a specific field, area, country or journal. Further to this, bibliometric studies also answer the knowledge contributions (Amiguet et al., 2017), institutional role (Martínez-López et al., 2018), geography (Bonilla et al., 2015), and subject areas (Saha et al., 2020). Fernandez-Alles and Ramos-Rodríguez (2009) highlighted that bibliometric studies reconstruct the history of various scientific trends and removal of misperceptions. Most of the journals publish their bibliometric studies on several occasions, for example, on anniversaries, end or start of the new decades and centuries. Some of the most recent bibliometric analysis are highlighted in Table 1. This study focuses on the trends of publications and citations of the Asian Academy of Management Journal (AAMJ). This study comprised over the 25 years of publishing, since the inception of AAMJ in 1996. The main source of data was retrieved from Scopus database, which comprised of over 5,000 publishers with more than 22,000 titles with real-time update and coverage of multidisciplinary areas around the globe.
AAMJ is jointly published by Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia and the Asian Academy of Management. AAMJ is one of the mainstream management journals; specifically from Asia, in general, while Malaysia, in specific. Within a time frame of 25 years, the management team of the journal has put countless efforts that enabled AAMJ to gain its place among the competitive world of publishing, appealed exceedingly well around the globe, and established its academic distinction in the area of business and management. AAMJ is one of the journals having the latest submission system using the ScholarOne Manuscripts™ along with reputable indexing databases such as Clarivate Analytics' Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Elsevier's Scopus, Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), and EBSCO.
On completion of the 25 years (silver jubilee) of AAMJ in publishing, this paper aims at analysing the trajectory of research by employing bibliometric analysis technique. This study addresses the most significant questions in the pursuit of publishing since 1996 by covering scattered dots of published research, publication structures, citations, trends, productive researchers, popular authors, and the most commonly used terminologies and keywords. Further to this, the current study highlights the performance of AAMJ, the most cited documents, contributions of countries, authors and institutions, collaboration among authors, countries, and journals.
Through covering the scattered dots, this study enables the editorial team, academicians, authors, and researchers to understand the scope and objectives of AAMJ. It assists researchers in identifying the gaps, mostly researched areas, and topics to set future research directions. This study also enables management of the journal to see which areas are uncovered during the last 25 years and then adjust the policies, scope, and "call for papers" accordingly. This paper has been given an order as follows: the first part covers the introduction, the second part explains the employed methods and materials. Abstracted results through software-generated bibliographic are summarised in section three. Section four comprises of discussion on the results, limitations, future directions, and conclusion.

METHODS
With an aim to extract bibliographic data of AAMJ, the Scopus database has been consulted. As Scopus database is one of the prominent peer-review repositories for researchers covering business, management, social sciences studies and is having plenty of datasets in repository related to the quantitative studies (Donthu et al., 2020), therefore for this quantitative study, data derived from Scopus database were used.
"Asian Academy of Management Journal" in the "Source Title" has been searched, which showed 343 documents in total. To ensure that publications of AAMJ are only to be included in the analysis, extracted data has been scrutinised manually and found 172 documents of the "Asian Academy of Management Journal of Accounting and Finance," were also listed in the database. Thus, those 172 documents were excluded from the extracted data as these were from another journal but in the database, it was shown collectively. Resultantly, bibliographic data of 171 AAMJ documents were extracted, and from the year 1996 to 2010, manually calculated 169 documents were additionally added for analysis purposes.
It is also pertinent to mention that, although AAMJ started its publications in 1996, however, the Scopus database started to record its publications from 2011 onwards, thus for running co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and co-occurrence of keywords analysis only 171 documents were consulted while to analyse the publication per year, manually extracted data from AAMJ website were considered for further reference. A detailed flow chart regarding the design of the study is shown in Figure 1. There are several ways to analyse journals through calculations regarding citations, documents, authors, countries, and couplings. The same way this study has been done with an extended focus on the total number of publications and total number of citations (it shows the popularity and impact of the research); therefore this study adopted bibliometric technique because it is one of the quantitative techniques (Broadus, 1987) that can provide a holistic view of the entire data and related details.
In this study, VOSviewer (Van Eck & Waltman, 2010) has been implied for data analysis. It generates analysed results in presentable forms of tables and graphics better than other software applications (Van Eck & Waltman, 2010). This software is found incredibly helpful in preparing and presenting the bibliometric coupling. Bibliographic coupling occurs when two works reference the third work in their bibliographies (Small, 1973). It is an indication that a probability exists that the two works treat a related subject matter. Two documents are being bibliographically coupled if both cite one or more documents in common. Cooccurrence of key terms means the key terms that repeatedly appear in the studied documents while co-citation is defined as the frequency with which two documents are cited together by a third document (Small, 1973, p. 265). The main usage of bibliometric coupling is to show the authors and institutions working together while co-citations are significant to show the documents and journals. Finally, cooccurrence is used for the categorisation of keywords under general topics and specific dimensions.

Structure of Publications and Citations in AAMJ
Over the last 25 years (1996-2019), AAMJ has published 340 (171 indexed in Scopus) documents in total, out of which the highest number of the documents (32) are found published in the year 2019 and the least (8) was in the year 1997. Table 2 summarised the yearly total number of publications and citations. AAMJ has published almost 14 documents on yearly average from 1996-2019. It is also found that AAMJ remained consistent in publishing the number of documents for 25 years except in 2016 and 2019 with the distinction of supplements issues. The case with the number of citations of AAMJ publications throughout this 25-year remained very dramatic. Figure 2 presents the number of publications and citations from 1996-2019. Figure 2 shows that in the first 12 years, AAMJ either did not get any citations or were not recorded in the databases. From the year 2008 onwards, AAMJ took a slow start and then reached a certain height of visibility around the world. As per Table 2, this growth trend is marvelous, especially in 2019, when it got the highest number of citations, 241. In the last 11 years, 340 documents of AAMJ received 598 citations.   Total citations = 598

Leading Authors, Countries, and Universities in AAMJ
It is observed that several well-known authors and researchers have contributed to AAMJ during the last 25 years, but some of them remained prominent in terms of number of publications and citations. Table 3 highlights the most influential authors in AAMJ for their contributions towards multiple documents and generated citations. From the table, Prashar, S.; Ramayah, T.; and Tan, C.L. were found to be the authors with maximum number of documents, each with five documents; followed by Masron, T.A.; Parsad, C.; and Vijay, T.S. with four documents each. Further to this, Prashar, S. and Tan, C.L. remained the most popular authors who secured eight citations form five documents, followed by Parsad, C. and Vijay, T.S with seven citations from four documents.  It is also estimated that some universities/institutes remained most popular in terms of publications and citations. Institution/university means the affiliations that authors showed when they published their works. The list of the universities/ institutes is summarised in Table 4. It is found that Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) remained at the top as it produced the highest number of documents (28). This sequence has been followed by International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) as these universities published 13 and 11 documents, respectively.
Another aspect of the study is to look at the country. Malaysia is the most productive country with 92 documents followed by India with 18 published documents, Australia with 16 documents, Vietnam with 10, and Indonesia with 9 documents remained quite visible on the chart. United States of America, Pakistan, Iran, and Thailand remained to be the lowest on the list as these countries could produce only 5 documents each with AAMJ.

The Most Cited Documents of AAMJ
This study highlights the most cited document since the inception of AAMJ. Details are summarised in Table 5

Most Productive Authors for Citing AAMJ
A list of most productive authors is given in Table 6. This analysis examines the significance, influence, and popularity of a journal as it identifies who cited AAMJ most frequently. At the top of the list are Fahmy-Abdullah, M., Omar, N.A., and Sieng, L.W. who cited AAMJ six times each followed by Al Mamun, A., Kumar, A., and Saudi, M.H.M. (five times); and Dash, M. K., Ichsani, S., Ququab, F., and Uddin, U. who cited four times each. It is also worth noting here that which country and journal has cited AAMJ publications. Table 7 shows the top citing journals, where "Journal of Advanced Research in Dynamical and Control Systems," "Sustainability," "International Journal of Innovation Creativity and Change," and "International Journal of Supply Chain Management" are found at the top of the list as these journals had cited AAMJ 15, 15, 13, and 13 times, respectively. The least productive journal was "African Journal of Hospitality Tourism and Leisure" which cited AAMJ six times. Table 7 further summarised the country which cited AAMJ.

Bibliographical Analysis of AAMJ by VOSviewer
This section explains the bibliographic coupling, co-occurrence of key terminologies, and co-citations through visual of bibliographic data. The first analysis is given in Figure 3 regarding co-citations. Laengle et al. (2018) pointed out that "co-citation of journals occurs when two documents of two different journals receive a citation from the same third document of another journal." It uses citation count to develop the similarity between the journals, documents, and or authors. A fundamental principle of co-citation is that the more two documents are co-cited, the more likely they would discuss the same research topics. In literature, different types of co-citations are used, for example, authors co-citations, journal co-citations (Farrukh et al., 2020a;2020b), and document co-citation analysis.
In Figure 3, each circle is representing a journal and connection circular lines highlight co-citation among journals. Figure 3 shows that the AAMJ, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Applied Psychology, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Marketing, and Decision Support Systems are the primary journals that are being mostly cited in AAMJ. As a significant finding is to understand the bibliographic coupling. The bibliographic coupling occurs when two different documents from two different sources cite a third document. Bibliographic coupling of countries happens when a document from Country A and Country B cite the third document from Country C commonly.

Trends in Topics: Future Research Directions
The co-occurrence of the keywords that authors have used in published documents with AAMJ presents a unique set of words. Co-occurrence of keywords in titles and abstracts show trends and covered area. Summary of co-occurrence of these words is given in Table 8.
Co-occurrence of keywords highlights the type of research remained popular and provides future direction to the researchers that if they are interested in publishing in AAMJ, they need to cover these areas and trends while the previous section explained the trajectory of the journal regarding most cited articles and authors. This helps future researchers to find out the next research project titles. The cooccurrence of keywords also helps in tracing documents in any of the specific areas for finding related literature for future research. These repeatedly used words provide a variety of research theories, models, focused management practices and industries, along with the respondent's level of service or business.
A close examination of Figure 5 reveals that most of the research in AAMJ has been conducted in Malaysia (highly occurred country name). Geographically, studies have been covering Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan, Australia, and Indonesia. It shows that AAMJ has covered global level research while the main flux remained focused around Asia. It can also be said that "corporate governance" remained the dominant topic of research in AAMJ over the last 25 years, further to this it is also found that "financial crises" and "performance" are the main areas covered by researchers while publishing in AAMJ.
From the theoretical point of view, "agency theory" has been employed in most of the studies in AAMJ publications. As small and medium enterprises (SMEs) remained the dominant industry in published research articles of AAMJ, future researchers who are interested in getting their work published in AAMJ can focus on business aspects especially related to "performance, organisational commitment, and job satisfaction" in SMEs. The geographical areas (as countries mentioned earlier) repeated in the published documents of AAMJ are the world's biggest markets and improving day by day, where economies are on growing trends. It indicates that future researchers can focus on these countries, and on the economics side -the corporate social responsibility (CSR) and knowledge.

IMPLICATIONS OF THE STUDY
Journals all around the world are expanding as according to the research conducted in the University of Ottawa (2009), "the total number of scientific papers published since 1665, is 50 million and approximately 2.5 million new scientific papers are published each year. With a variety of subjects, approximately 64,000 journals are out there" (Jinha, 2010).
Further to this as Scardamalia (2002, p. 68) summarised, "the academic journals provide the base for the advancement and evolution of knowledge of the community of academicians as well as industries," these journals provide bases and gradual addition, subtractions, an amalgamation of theories and models with several aspects, cultural backgrounds, and industries. The same is the case with AAMJ as it completed its 25 years of successful publications. Through this paper, it gets revealed that there are certain industries and topics which are as attractive for researchers as these were 25 years back in history. AAMJ has achieved a gradual increase in the number of publications which means most of the time, the finding of one study becomes the starting point for other studies, which further means concepts get nestled year to year.
Future researchers who are interested in publishing with AAMJ should focus on agency theory, financial markets, Malaysia, Indonesia, and SMEs. By doing this, the chances of getting their future research acceptance for publishing in AAMJ seems high. However, in a worldwide perspective, AAMJ has not been in the extremely popular journals compared to the other journals related to management sciences and business education. For any of the journals the pursuit of publications and moving from a lower category to the upper class have never been easy going. Therefore, for the management of the AAMJ, this study suggests some research topics that can ensure the increment in publishing. AAMJ can introduce extra issues in a year and special issues to grab the attention of the famous authors by hitting their interest areas. This study also highlights valuable guidelines for the reviewers to evaluate received articles, keeping in view the Asian demographics, as it prevailed in AAMJ throughout 25 years. The management of the journals can also see which journals are cociting with AAMJ, and they can manage collective efforts with those journals in managing new topics, conferences, and special issues.

CONCLUSION
The bibliometric analysis identifies the scientific activities in the targeted areas or journals and predicts research trends. In this connection, bibliometric studies provide a summary of journals' activities in one document and endow with undiscovered aspects of industries and subject areas. This study also attempted to do the same with specific consideration of AAMJ, and it covered approximately 2.5 decades (1996-2019) based on the data available in the Scopus database and AAMJ website.
The first part of the study was to analyse the productivity of the journal, identification of productive authors, influence of institutions, and frequency of the contributors from different countries towards publications in AAMJ; while the second part was comprised of jotting down the guidelines for the stakeholders. Therefore, this paper added value towards the scientific contributions and in-depth analysis of publications. Since the inception of AAMJ, it published a total of 340 documents with 590 citations. From the year 1996 to 2008 AAMJ got no citations (it is possible the no citations were recorded), which has hurt its visibility around the world for the 13 years and later from 2009 onwards it got gradual growth both in publications and citations where in 2019 it published maximum documents (32) and maximum citations (241). The year 2019 remained the most productive year for the journal where the maximum number of published documents generated higher number of citations. It showed that AAMJ remained exceptionally much, acting for the last 11 years. Further to this, the most cited documents and the most productive authors were highlighted. Malaysia remained the main country and SMEs as the main industry of the studies. This all shows that AAMJ has covered the main contributing countries and authors from Asia with several multidisciplinary valuable productions of documents. Its co-citations and bibliometric coupling showed that AAMJ is not only popular in Asia but also referred to in the advanced countries.
This study has been done under certain limitations, including the Scopus database as data was taken from the sources by exploring through online access. One of the primary limitations was the affiliations of the authors. Author affiliations were taken as they mentioned in the databases. These affiliations were taken at the time when authors produced documents; afterwards, they may have changed their affiliations. Further, one author may have several publications and affiliations at the same time as authors may or may not have been with the same university or institute over multiple years. Despite the limitations, this study articulated research trends for the last 25 years in AAMJ, which guide researchers, reviewers, and management of the journals for necessary steps to be taken for continuous production of the new documents and citations.
AAMJ has proven to be a highly respected journal and has earned high status in the field of management and business research for the past 25 years. AAMJ has made outstanding academic achievements by studying "classic" subjects in specific disciplines. AAMJ has witnessed late but tremendous growth in its publications and citations, demonstrating that it is an exceedingly significant and worthy academic and research channel that has imparted knowledge in many fields. We pay tribute to all contributors (including authors, reviewers, management of the journal, and editors) of the journal for their invaluable academic contributions and efforts to elevate AAMJ to the level it enjoys today.