Foster earns another #3 world ranking for research productivity

The UW Foster School’s Department of Marketing and International Business

The research faculty of the UW Foster School of Business is the third most-productive in the world, according to the latest “Top 100 Business School Research Rankings” compiled by the University of Texas at Dallas Jindal School of Business.

The UTD index tracks the total number of papers published by each school’s faculty in the leading 24 business journals, across disciplines and over various periods of time. Each publication receives a weighted score based on the number of co-authors from each institution. For the calendar year 2017, Foster School researchers contributed 47 papers to those 24 journals. This places Foster behind only the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) and New York University (Stern).

Across the most recent five-year period tabulated by the index, Foster ranks #16 in North America and #17 in the world, underscoring the school’s steady increase in productivity over the past few years.

Discipline rankings 

The database used to compile the Top 100 Business School Research Rankings also reveals the magnitude of contributions made by each of Foster’s academic departments to their respective fields.

In 2017, the Foster School’s Department of Management and Organization faculty published the #4 most publications in the world, across the five management journals tracked in the UT-Dallas index. Foster also ranks #5 nationally in the latest “Management Department Productivity Ranking,” produced annually by Texas A&M University (Mays) and the University of Georgia (Terry). This unweighted ranking measures each school’s total number of studies published in the eight most-important management journals during 2016.

Foster’s Department of Finance and Business Economics is ranked #5 in the world, according to the Top 100 Business School Research Rankings, for its 2017 publication record across the three finance journals considered in the UT-Dallas index. Foster also generated the #10 most publications in the top four finance journals over the period from 2015 to 2016, according to the current “Finance Ranking Index” which is maintained by Arizona State University (Carey).

Foster’s Department of Marketing and International Business comes in at #8 in the Top 100 Business School Research Rankings, based on its 2017 publication record in the four top marketing journals and one international business journal considered in the index. In an internal audit of scholarly productivity, the department found that it ranked #6 in the world in terms of career productivity per research professor.

The Foster Department of Accounting ranks #9 in the Top 100 Business School Research Rankings, for its 2017 publications in the three accounting journals tracked. Foster also ranks #23 in the world in total studies published across 12 accounting journals over the past six years (through 2017), according to the annual Brigham Young University (Marriott) Accounting Rankings. Foster has been especially prolific in the studies of financial accounting, where it ranks #10 in the world over the past six years, and managerial accounting, where it ranks #19 in the world over the same period.

And the Foster School’s Department of Information Systems and Operations Management registers at #25 in the Top 100 Business School Research Rankings for its 2017 publications across six journals tracked.

Foster’s Department of Information Systems and Operations Management

Three is a magic number

Earlier this year, Financial Times also ranked the Foster School faculty #3 in the world and #1 among public universities for research productivity.

FT’s research index, a factor in the venerable newspaper’s “2018 Global MBA Rankings,” is derived by tallying the number of research papers by each b-school’s faculty that are published in the top 45 scholarly journals, representing every business discipline. The ranking is weighted to reflect the relative size of each faculty.

To achieve the #3 spot globally, the Foster School vaulted 13 spots in the past two years. Foster faculty members were more productive per capita than counterparts at UC Berkeley (Haas), Harvard (HBS), Stanford (GSB), MIT (Sloan), Michigan (Ross), Chicago (Booth), Northwestern (Kellogg), Yale and many other prominent business schools. Only Pennsylvania (Wharton) and Duke (Fuqua) ranked higher for research.