Measuring Canadian business school research output and impact

Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, Jun 2002 by Erhan Erkut

The citation-count trend analysis conducted so far assumes that we will keep all of the current papers in the database. If one uses a sliding window of 10 years, then the picture may change in the future. For example, HEC derives only 21% of its citation credits from papers published in 1990 and 1991 whereas York derives 52% of its credits from these papers.

The limited trend analysis we conducted suggests that the big picture will not change significantly in the short run, assuming there are no changes in the faculty membership. It seems that UBC will likely maintain its position given its largest citation-count trend among all schools. York and McMaster may experience declines, given their recent negative paper trends and below average citation-count trends, and Ivey may experience an increase primarily due to its recent positive paper-count trend.

Comparing Areas: Where Do the Papers and Citations Come From?

Our database contains 779 journals (recall that we counted every paper written by a Canadian business school academic, regardless of which ISI publication it appeared in). Many of these journals are from disciplines other than business and one may wonder about the effect on our results of publications in these journals. While it may be impossible to reach agreement on which journals should be included in an evaluation of business school research, it is possible to restrict the analysis to journals that are classified by ISI in fields that are identifiable with business schools: economics, business, management, finance, psychology (and applied psychology), industrial and manufacturing engineering, operations research and management science, information science, computer science, labour relations, public administration, applied mathematics, statistics and probability. While this restriction reduces the number of journals under consideration by half, the total number of papers goes down by only 20%. The top nine schools retain 84% of their paper credits and 88% of their citation credits after the elimination of journals in other disciplines. The rankings among the top nine do not change. However, the citation credit gap between UBC and the other schools closes somewhat since UBC retains only 75% of its citation credits. Apparently a larger-than-average proportion of UBC's citations come from journals in other disciplines. Ivey retains the most citation credits with 97%, suggesting that almost all of Ivey's citation credits come from journals identifiable with business schools.

We also generated a discipline-based comparison of schools, using a small set of selected journals. Identification of business areas and their pertinent journal lists is a challenging and contentious task. The difficulties are compounded by the limitations of the ISI database. To generate our list of areas and journals, we started with the classifications by the Financial Times and the Business Research Project (a collaborative effort by UBC, Alberta, and Toronto), and expanded upon them using our citation data. We then used some simple inclusion rules to arrive at our final list of discipline areas. An area was included only if we could find at least four qualifying journals. A journal qualified if our database contained at least four papers published in it, and the journal had a citation-to-paper ratio of two or more (based on the papers in our database). Using these criteria we created a total of eight areas with 55 journals.