Measuring Canadian business school research output and impact

Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, Jun 2002 by Erhan Erkut

* A three-page article summarizing the results in the management science area was published in the November 2001 issue of the Canadian Operational Research Society's Bulletin (Erkut, 2001), which attracted further attention to the study and the web site.

Despite our efforts, given the magnitude of the study we do not believe it is possible to create a perfect database. Hence, the results should be treated with caution and small differences between schools should not be considered meaningful.

Results: Aggregate

Our study considers 2,495 faculty members currently employed by 60 business schools in Canada. These academics have authored or co-authored a total of 4,617 journal articles in 779 ISI-indexed journals published during the period 1990-1999. The total number of confirmable citations to these papers (as of May 2001) is 22,303. The complete faculty and article database for each school can be accessed from the accompanying web site. We discuss our most important findings here by first addressing the questions "Where do Canadian business school academics publish?" and "Which journals produce the most citations?" We then consider the aggregate paper-count and citation-count data at the national level. This top-level discussion is followed by our summary of the university-level data. Finally, we discuss the paper and citation data at the individual level.

Where Do They Publish?

Table 1 displays a list of journals where at least 20 papers by Canadian business academics were published during the 1990s. There are 2,033 papers in these 48 journals, accounting for 44% of all papers in the study. While the presence of several Canadian business journals on this list is not surprising, it is noteworthy that several top-tier international journals, such as Management Science, Academy of Management Journal, and Journal of Finance, are also on this list.

Which Journals Are Cited the Most?

Table 2 displays the top 30 journals in terms of the total number of citations received. (This is not a citation per paper list; the rankings are with respect to total numher of citations.) These 30 journals account for half of the citation credits in the study. This lends further empirical evidence to the assertion that a small number of journals account for most of the research impact.

The list contains a large number of journals that are considered to be top-tier journals. For example, of the 30 academic journals used by Financial Times to measure research output, 16 are present on this list (another three were not indexed by ISI during 1990-1999, and one was indexed only after 1995).

It is interesting to note that there are not many Canadian journals on this list. It seems that Canadian academics publish quite a few papers in Canadian journals, but they do not cite many papers published in Canadian journals.

Total Number of Papers Published by All Canadian Business School Academics

The 2,495 academics included in the study received a total of 2,934 paper credits (an average of 1.2 paper credits/person) and 13,780 citation credits (an average of 5.5 citation credits/person) over the entire time period covered by this study. (The averages for just those 1,157 academics that actually published something in those 10 years, in an ISI-indexed journal, are 2.5 paper credits/person and 11.9 citation credits/person.) The annual number of paper credits for Canadian academics in business schools increased between 1991 and 1996, peaking at 352.7 paper credits in 1996, and then decreased during the last three years of the study. In the most recent year of the study (1999), the 2,495 academics in our database received a total of 282.9 paper credits (about 0.11 credits/academic)-a 20% decline from the 1996 total. Figure 1 displays the annual paper credits for all Canadian business school academics.