Out of this total pool, a total of 61 of these articles were empirical works.
The remaining 63 were non-empirical studies, consisting of conceptual,
review, or opinion-type contributions. The large number articles in this latter
category was greater than expected and probably reflects several factors.
First, while several leading marketing journals generally favor the
publication of empirical articles, several of the outlets searched in the present
study appear not to have such a bias. Indeed, journals such as European
Journal of Marketing, Journal of Services Marketing, Service Industries
Journal, and International Journal of Service Industry Management contain
a very large proportion of purely conceptual or opinion articles. Second,
several journals are published in Europe where traditional scholarship is
more oriented than in North America toward conceptual research (Gronroos,
1991). Finally, as indicated earlier, international services marketing research
is in its infancy and requires conceptual-type research, as opposed to
hypothesis testing and other types of confirmatory work, in order to build a
conceptual foundation for subsequent empirical studies.
As indicated in Table II, the primary publication outlets for international
services marketing research from 1980 to 1998 were the Service Industries
Journal (38), Journal of International Business Studies (13), European
Journal of Marketing (12), and the Journal of Services Marketing (10). It
should be noted that the large number of articles in the Service Industries
Journal is partially the result of that journal featuring special issues on
international services topics within recent years. Surprisingly, more than half