Measuring Canadian business school research output and impact

Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, Jun 2002 by Erhan Erkut

Distribution of Citation Counts for Papers

The average total number of citations a paper receives is a function of the paper's age. Given publication delays, most papers receive no citations in the year they are published (or the year after). Then the average number of citations gradually increases to about 9.5 in 11 years. Keeping in mind that more recent papers have not been around long enough to collect many citation credits, we limited the analysis summarized in Table 3 and Figure 2 to citations collected as of May 2001 by the 2,071 papers published in the five-year period 19901994. (The citation results reported elsewhere in this article are based on the full set of 4,617 papers.) Table 3 provides the aggregate statistics for the citations counts of these papers, and Figure 2 displays the frequency chart. Note that over 20% of these earlier papers received no citations despite being in the literature for at least six years. The mode of the distribution is zero.

Authors

Only 34 authors (1.4%) received more than 10 paper credits, and only 111 authors (4.4%) received between 5 and 9.9 paper credits, over the 10-year publication period. Of the 2,495 Canadian business academics in our study, 1,338 (54%) published no papers during the period 1990-1999 in journals that are indexed by ISI. (It should be kept in mind that a significant number of these academics received their Ph.D.s between 1990 and 1999.) In addition to those who published no papers during the study period, another 215 academics who authored or co-authored at least one paper received zero citations. Hence, only 37.5% of all academics received citations. Of these, only 286 authors have received an average of one or more citation credits per year, and only 22 authors received a total of 100 or more citation credits. Table 4 contains the aggregate statistics for paper and citation credits for the 1,157 authors who appear in the ISI index, and Figures 3 and 4 contain the corresponding frequency charts.

Results: Comparisons of Schools

The bubble chart in Figure 5 displays the nine faculties with 600 citation credits or more. (Information about other schools can be obtained from the accompanying web site.) These nine faculties account for almost 70% of all citation credits in the study. There is a fairly sharp drop after the ninth school; the citation credit of the 10th school (Concordia) is less than 70% of that of the 9th school.

As Figure 5 shows, there are significant differences between schools (note the scale). UBC is well ahead of all others in terms of both paper credits and citation credits. Following UBC is a pack of four schools (Toronto, HEC, York, and McMaster), with Toronto leading in both criteria. These four are followed by Ivey, McGill, Alberta, and Queen's. It is noteworthy that Ivey has by far the highest citation credits-to-paper credits ratio. (In fact, Ivey has more citations than McMaster with less than half the paper credits.) This is an indication that, on average, Ivey faculty members have been able to achieve a larger impact with their papers than academics at other schools.