An overview of articles on Competitive Intelligence in JCIM and CIR

Abstract

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