An overview of articles on Competitive Intelligence in JCIM and CIR

This paper presents an overview of fifty-one articles from the Journal of Competitive Intelligence and Management (JCIM) posted on the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals ́ webpage. It also looks at sixty-tree randomly selected articles out of about 250 from the Competitive Intelligence Review (CIR), published between 1996 and 2001. The first analysis is based on a comparison with eleven different variables that have been picked out from each of the articles. Findings: The most common country where the authors’ come from is the United States of America. Sixty-one of the eighty-three authors have a higher degree, first of all MBA and/or Ph.D. North American authors have a higher degree than authors from Europe. Authors from North America have contributed with fifty-seven percent of the proposals for further research of a total of twenty-one proposals. Fourteen articles have a professional author. The rest are academic contributions. The main topic in these articles is how to develop Competitive Intelligence (CI) but also how to define CI. The articles have different methodological approaches, qualitative and quantitative. Seventy tree percent have a qualitative approach and of those there are thirty-seven percent that also have a qualitative approach. For the second analysis dedicated to CIR one clear conclusion points to the large number of articles which resulted from the introduction of the Economic Espionage Act of 1997. Most contributions at CIR come from practitioners. 1


The aim of this paper
The purpose of this study is to present an overview of scientific articles in the Journal of Competitive Intelligence and Management (JCIM) and the Competitive Intelligence Review (CIR).The analyses were done to bring clarity on key variables identified for this study.Part 1.2 -3 are concerned with JCIM.Part 4 is concerned with CIR.

Focus
The first table (table 1.) show empirical findings divided into eleven variables.These variables form the basis of the analysis.These are; geographic, focus, theoretical, empirical, qualitative, quantitative, proposals for further research, the author's background, gender, nationality and education.Geographic means were the study takes place and were the research is done, focus is the authors main topic in the article, theoretical/ empirical/ qualitative/ quantitative these are variables that show how the articles are built-up and which method have been used.Proposals for further research are suggestions for continued research.Author's background tells us if the author works at a university or for a company.Gender is the sex of the author(s).Nationality tells us where the authors are citizens and Education is the author's degrees.

Report structure
The report is structured as follows: Section 2 is Methodology.In Section 3 Empirical findings are represented.This includes a table of all the scientific articles that have been investigated.Other tables and diagrams can be found here, containing comparisons with selected variables.Conclusions from the empirical findings are placed in this section.Section 4 contains an overview of article published in CIR.Conclusions which summarizes the papers findings are found in section 5, followed by references of all articles checked.

Methodology
The Journal of Competitive Intelligence and Management was published between 2004 and 2008.Three articles were excluded from this overview as they did not include a sufficient amount of variables.
An empirical analysis was conducted in order to detect similarities and inequalities in the articles.To compare the articles, eleven variables were selected.The selected variables were picked out from reading a few articles at random first.Similar variables were interesting to explore further in other articles.The empirical table is focused on eleven variables.These variables form the basis of the analysis and conclusions.
There are three tables.Table 1 shows Geographical background, focus of research articles and it says whether or not the article is theoretical or empirical.

Empirical findings
Data is provided for fifty-one articles.Thirty-three percent are about CI as a new study and its different forms in different countries.This reflects the newness of the topic.Analyze the relationship between the performance of the organization and the use of various CI activities and to seek the link between CI and strategic planning.X A quantitative study using a survey instrument to explore the relationship between the use of formal HR related CI processes and measures of strategic and HR performance.X X X X

Art Geographic Focus
Investigation into the physiology of effective CI managers in a high technology/innovation driven industry.X X how some countries have managed to position themselves as economically stronger then their neighbors, and how intelligence has played a part in their growth.X X The chart over the fifty-one articles shows that there are a total of eighty-three authors.That gives 1.63 writers per article.

Figure 1: JCIM Authors by country
The chart shows that the authors comes from twenty-one different coutries, and the country most authors come from is the U.S with 30% of the writers.The countries that follow are Canada and the United Kingdom, both with 13% of the writers.The countries that are the least represented in the Journal of Competitive Intelligence and Management of the ones published is Brazil, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Korea, Lithuania, New Zeeland, Russia, Sweden and Qatar; all with 1% of the authors.The authors' backgrounds show that 60% are males and 40% females.(Both editors were females.)Totally there were fifty men and thirty-three women represented as authors.
The table shows that sixty-one of these eighty-three authors have a higher academic degree, first of all MBA, Ph.D. and Dr. Europe is represented with a total of thirty-six authors.Eleven of these have a PhDs degree, two have a Dr. degree (often equivalent to a PhD, for example can be that the dissertation was completed in a German speaking country), six have an MBA degree, six have other sorts of higher degrees and eleven authors have no higher degree stated.North America is represented with nineteen PhDs degrees, no Dr., five MBAs, five other sorts of higher degree, six of no higher degree from a total of thirty-five authors in North America.South America has one Dr. degree represented.Oceania has one other sort of higher degree and two with no other higher degree.The continent of Asia has two PhDs, two MBAs, one other higher degree and one no higher degree.This makes a total of six authors from Asia.Africa got one PhD and one other no higher degree presented.

Continent
There are sixty-two authors who has got some form of degree, 47% of these are from North America.Europe comes next with 37% and the other four continents constitute under 10%.On the PhD level North America is represented with the most, with 58% and Europe comes second with 33%.The table demonstrates that the continent of North America is represented with higher degrees and more degrees then the continent of Europe despite that Europe got one more author represented than North America.
Table 1 shows that almost 40% of the articles suggest further research within the subject of Competitive Intelligence or Business Intelligence.
There is a need identified to explore the areas deeper.

Figure 2: Articles with suggestions of future research
The chart above shows that the continent of North America gives 57% of all the proposals or suggestions for further research of a total of twenty-one proposals.Next come Europe with 31%.Oceania has 10% of the proposals and Asia 2%.South America and Africa are not represented with further proposals for future research.
Another variable that can have an impact on the articles is the author's backgrounds.Some authors are professionals, from the business community, but most come from universities and have an academic background.Out of fifty-one articles only fourteen have authors with a business community attachment.That is 27% of all articles published in JCIM.
A conclusion from the variable focus is that they can be divided in to different groups.The main topic is how to develop Competitive Intelligence but also how to define CI.The articles about developing CI have also different subjects.Some are about development in general (universal) others about development in different countries (cultural).The second largest group is on defining CI and about the growth of CI throughout history.
The third largest focus is on Business Intelligence (BI) and how to use it in the best way.
Of all the articles about the use and development of CI, 90,9% have chosen a qualitative approach and of those there are 30% that have both approaches.9,10% of all articles have chosen a quantitative approach.100% of the articles with the topic defining CI are qualitative.100% of the articles on the topic of BI are qualitative, out of those 17 % are both qualitative and quantitative.Out of those articles which explore CI in different industries 66,67% are qualitative, and 50% of those have both a qualitative and a quantitative approach.There are 33,33% which only use the quantitative approach.
The articles that use only a qualitative approach typically have proposals for further research where they suggest a quantitative rmethod.In total, of all articles regardless topic, there are 92,16% with a qualitative approach and of those there are 17,02% with both approaches.Only 7,84% has solely a quantitative approach.

Overview of CIR
When gathering information for the data set, we used a stratified random sample approach.The methodology gives the possibility to collect a number of articles from each year.From approximately 250 articles published between 1996 and 2001, we picked every fourth article to summarize in the data set.In the data set, we present the variables we found interesting for the summary.We used four levels of Competitive Intelligence as sub-categories.These were categories that were most popular as subjects: article about companies, products, about marketing and partnership and cooperation (organization).The sub-categories give the opportunity to analyze differences between articles on the four levels.

Company level.
The first category is the company level.These accounted for forty-seven articles.

Conclusion
In conclusion CIR was a popular magazine primarily for the American market.This is reflected in the high number of American authors (67%) writing about their experience with CI in different companies.85% of contributions were made by men and 60% by practitioners in the first group.The trend is even stronger in the second group, with articles about products.It is about the same in the group on marketing too, but here female participants are more numerous.In the last group females are in the majority (75%).There is also a much more even distribution between countries of origin.Very few articles have a clear quantitative or qualitative approach, but are most informative and explorative in nature.
Table 2 continues and says whether articles are qualitative or quantitative and what suggestions they have for future research.

Table 1 :
Country of origin, topics and method

Table 2 :
Method and suggestions for future research (when applicable)

Table 3 :
Background, Gender, Nationality and Degrees

Table 4 :
A summarized table of education and geographical location of authors

Table 6 :
Articles categorized by the Product level

Table 8 :
Articles categorized by the Partnership level