Looking back at the first year of IJPHM

Citation

Mukherjee, A. (2007), "Looking back at the first year of IJPHM", International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing, Vol. 1 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijphm.2007.32401daa.001

Looking back at the first year of IJPHM

Looking back at the first year of IJPHM

It is time to celebrate one year of launch of the International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing (IJPHM) from Emerald Publishing. After all, it is widely believed in the academic publishing world that the first year of a new journal is the most crucial one. Filling a much-felt need gap for a high quality publishing outlet in this niche area of research, IJPHM has attracted the attention of leading scholars in the discipline in the very first year of its existence. Consistent with the objectives of the journal laid out in my first editorial (Mukherjee, 2007), IJPHM has achieved both quality and quantity in manuscript submissions and a dedicated team of outstanding reviewers. With the fourth and final issue of the first volume of IJPHM in publication, it is time to review the first year of this journal.

I first present an analysis of the type of articles that got published in IJPHM in the first year. Of the published articles, 40 per cent deal with the pharmaceutical sector and 60 per cent with healthcare. The international nature of the published articles in the first year of the journal is justified by the country-of-author mix: the USA (67.31 per cent), New Zealand (11.54 per cent), India (7.69 per cent), the UK (5.77 per cent), China (3.85 per cent), The Netherlands (1.92 per cent) and Singapore (1.92 per cent). The 22 articles published in the first year of this journal can be classified into research papers (63.64 per cent), viewpoint papers (13.64 per cent), technical papers, conceptual papers and case studies (4.55 per cent each), and book reviews (9.09 per cent). We also see a good mix of articles authored by one author (27.27 per cent), two authors (31.82 per cent), three authors (18.18 per cent), and four authors (22.73 per cent). Finally, while academicians grab the major share of authorships (82.35 per cent), 11.76 per cent of the authors are from industry/corporate sector, and 5.88 per cent from government or regulatory organizations.

Let me now turn to the five articles published in this issue. The first article of this issue is on direct to consumer advertising of pharmaceutical products. Though there is a plethora of research in this area, Chen and Carroll offer a fresh perspective to this issue by identifying the types of patients most likely to visit physicians in response to direct to consumer prescription drug advertising (DTCA). Using data generated from a large-scale national telephone survey, Chen and Carroll concluded that patients having positive beliefs about DTCA, preferring media information sources, and more susceptible to diseases treatable with prescription drugs were more likely to respond to DTCA by visiting physicians.

The second article addresses the tenuous link between hospital quality and services profitability. Hegji, Self and Findley, using a sample of 88 Alabama hospitals, demonstrate how quality of care for heart attack, myocardial infarction, and pneumonia can predict profits in a wide variety of hospital services.

Healthcare service for seniors within the broader domain of gerontology is a growing field of research in healthcare marketing and management, given the demographic changes in the population. Based on a large sample of 1,075 nursing homes, Davis, Marino, and Davis conclude that for-profit nursing homes are predisposed to offer community-based senior services, while innovative nursing homes are less likely to offer these services. They further observe that nursing homes with slack in the form of physical therapists offer these services, while homes with nurse's aide slack are less likely to offer these services.

The fourth article by Moskowitz, Rabino, Gofman, and Moskowitz offers a unique perspective to effective communications in the midst of a crisis in the pharmaceutical industry context. Using a statistically grounded experimental design for evaluating communications messages and personal values, the authors propose a framework that could help the pharmaceutical industry to develop and structure its communications thus providing buyers and sellers with a better procedure to drive decisions about buy/sell stocks.

The final article by Mukherjee and McGinnis adopts a key theme identification approach through qualitative meta-analysis and identifies five major themes of e-healthcare research: cost savings; virtual networking; electronic medical records; source credibility and privacy concerns; and physician-patient relationships.

In the second year of its publication and beyond, IJPHM will strive to reach out to new areas of research and new groups of researchers. Considering that marketing is a general theme of all articles published in this journal, several articles have concentrated on the physician-patient relationship. Most articles received so far address issues pertaining to the patients, physicians, hospitals, and pharmaceutical firms. I would encourage future research to focus on the other actors in the healthcare sector, such as insurers, pharmacists, drug stores, detail sales people, dentists, government regulatory agencies, health research funding bodies, medical universities, professional organizations, consumer watch-dog groups, lobbyists, etc. Further, healthcare researchers come from several disciplines. Beyond marketing and business/management, I invite more submissions from scholars in disciplines such as health administration, medicine, pharmacy, nursing, psychology, sociology, epidemiology, public health, policy, etc.

I thank the members of the Editorial Board for their continuous support for the journal. Their expertise and valuable feedback are always greatly appreciated. On behalf of the publisher and the editorial board, I wish to thank the able team of reviewers who kindly reviewed the many articles that were submitted for this journal. A selected list of reviewers for 2007 is provided below. As befits the scope of the journal, its reviewers, just like its articles, are truly international.

This journal could not have made such a promising start without the highly professional contribution of the publishing team at Emerald. I thank Kate Snowden, James Rand, and Martyn Lawrence, Publishers at Emerald, for offering the strongest support an academic editor can look for. The School of Business at Montclair State University provided me encouragement and support for this editing work since 2006 when the journal plan was approved by the publisher. I would particularly like to thank Dr Alan Oppenheim, Dean of the School of Business, and Dr John McGinnis, Chair of the Marketing Department, for providing the services of a graduate student for the journal. My special thanks to Kai Li Weng, Editorial Assistant, for working so hard on the journal. I owe all this also to my father, a retired professor, who inspired me to edit this journal and to my mother for all her good wishes on this venture.

I am sure you will enjoy reading the articles in this issue. Let us work together to make IJPHM the premier journal in its field.

Avinandan Mukherjee

ReferenceMukherjee, A. (2007), “Editorial: launching the International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing”, International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 5-11.

Selected reviewers for 2007

Subir Bandopadhyay, Indiana University Northwest, USA

Ashish Chandra, Marshall University, USA

Patrali Chatterjee, Montclair State University, USA

Junsong Chen, China Europe International Business School, China

Gerry Cleaves, Fairleigh Dickinson University, USA

Alberto Coustasse, University of North Texas Health Science Center, USA

Ike Ekeledo, Montclair State University, USA

Christine Ennew, Nottingham University, UK

Chinmoy Ghosh, University of Connecticut, USA

Stephen J. Gould, Baruch College, CUNY, USA

Mahmud Hassan, Rutgers University, USA

Hong Wei He, University of East Anglia, UK

Anurag Hingorani, UTS, Sydney, Australia

Gillian Hogg, Strathclyde Business School, UK

Sharan Jagpal, Rutgers – The State University of New Jersey, USA

Anand Jaiswal, IIM Ahmedabad, India

Jill Jesson, Aston Business School, UK

Mark Johnson, Montclair State University, USA

Gregory Katz-Benichou, ESSEC, France

Mark J. Kay, Montclair State University, USA

John McGinnis, Montclair State University, USA

Neeru Malhotra, Aston Business School, UK

Vivek Natarajan, Lamar University, USA

Prithwiraj Nath, Nottingham University, UK

Mary Beth Pinto, Pennsylvania State University, USA

Manuel Pontes, Rowan University, USA

P.M. Rao, Long Island University, USA

Michel Rod, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ

G. Shainesh, IIM, Bangalore, India

Daniel Simonet, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Eugene Sivadas, University of Washington, Tacoma, USA

Deborah Spake, University of South Alabama, USA

Han Srinivasan, University of Connecticut, USA

George Stone, North Carolina A&T State University, USA

Dilaver Tengilimoglu, Gazi University, Turkey

Bill Trombetta, Saint Joseph's University, USA

Yawei Wang, Montclair State University, USA

Daniel West, University of Scranton, USA

Judy Zolkiewski, Manchester Business School, UK

Nashat Zuraikat, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA