Financial Times ranks Foster faculty #12 in the world for research productivity

Financial Times has ranked the UW Foster School of Business faculty #12 in the world, #11 in the United States and #3 among public business schools for research productivity over the past three years.

This research ranking is a factor in FT’s Global MBA Rankings 2023, which places the Foster Full-time MBA Program at #19 in the nation. The FT research index is derived by tallying the number of research papers authored by each business school’s faculty that were published in the top 50 academic and practitioner journals, representing every business discipline, between January 2020 and August 2022.

“Outstanding faculty serve as the foundation of a top-ranked business school. Our faculty conduct impactful research that helps us achieve our purpose of bettering humanity through business, and then bring that cutting-edge knowledge into the classroom to help educate tomorrow’s leaders,” said Frank Hodge, the Orin and Janet Smith Dean of the Foster School. “I am very proud of our faculty and the differences they make in the lives of our students and the communities we serve.”

Staying power

Some reliance on reputation scores to calculate many of the MBA and undergraduate program rankings tends to result in indices that are fairly static, with little movement up or down from year to year.

Research rankings are different. The annual volume of publications can vary dramatically at even the most productive of research institutions. Despite this reality, the Foster School has maintained its position among the top-performing research faculties over a sustained period.

Financial Times has listed Foster’s faculty among the world’s top 20 in research every year since 2016. This run includes a #16 ranking in 2016, #7 in 2017, #3 in 2018, #7 in 2019, #6 in 2020, #4 in 2021, #20 in 2022 and #12 in 2023.

Over the past seven years, the average of Foster’s FT research rankings is #8.4 in the world.

End-to-end excellence

The Foster School faculty’s sustained standing in the Financial Times index is the product of balance across business disciplines. Each of Foster’s five academic departments ranks among the nation’s top 20 in at least one of the various field-specific research indices.

The Foster Department of Management and Organization is ranked #4 in the nation in research productivity from 2017 to 2021, according to the most recent Management Department Productivity Ranking, produced annually by Texas A&M University and the University of Georgia. This unweighted ranking measures each school’s total number of studies published in the eight most-important management journals over a five-year period.

Foster’s Department of Accounting ranks #8 in the US (#10 in the world) for its record of studies published across the top 11 accounting journals over the past six years (2016-2021), according to the annual BYU Accounting Rankings (new data through 2022 is preliminary). Over the same period, Foster ranks #2 in the specialty of financial accounting.

The Foster School’s Department of Marketing and International Business registers at #8 in the US in the current Top 100 Business School Research Rankings (compiled by University of Texas as Dallas), based on its 2018-2022 publication record in the top four marketing journals considered in the index.

Foster’s Department of Information Systems and Operations Management comes in at #16 in the UTD Top 100 Business School Research Rankings for its 2018-2022 publication rate across eight journals tracked. The department is also ranked #5 in the world for information systems research productivity over the past three years by the Association for Information Systems.

And Foster’s Department of Finance and Business Economics is ranked #20 in the nation for research prowess in the 2022 Global Ranking of Academic Subjects, which weighs publications in top journals, citations, per-capita academic performance and other indicators of research excellence for the period between 2016 and 2020.