Foster ranked #4 in the world for research productivity by Financial Times

Foster’s Department of Information Systems and Operations Management

Financial Times has ranked the UW Foster School of Business faculty #4 in the world, #3 in the United States and #1 among public business schools for research productivity over the past three years.

This research index, a factor in FT’s 2021 Global MBA Rankings, is derived by tallying the number of research papers by each b-school’s full-time faculty that were published in the top 50 academic and practitioner journals, representing every business discipline, between January 2018 and August 2020. The ranking is weighted to reflect the relative size of each faculty.

FT’s global top 10 in research for 2021 includes:

  1. Washington University (Olin)
  2. University of Chicago (Booth)
  3. INSEAD
  4. University of Washington (Foster)
  5. University of Texas at Dallas (Jindal)
  6. Northwestern University (Kellogg)
  7. University of Minnesota (Carlson)
  8. Indiana University (Kelley)
  9. Duke University (Fuqua)
  10. University of Toronto (Rotman)

Though seven prominent schools declined to participate in this year’s FT ranking, Foster’s #4 spot is very much in line with recent performance (see below).

Staying power

The prolific rankings of MBA and undergraduate business programs tend to give significant weight to reputation, resulting in entrenched indices with little movement up or down over the years.

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.

Foster’s Department of Management and Organization is ranked #4 in the world for research productivity.

Foster’s faculty has been listed among the world’s top 25 in research every year since FT began tracking scholarly output. This includes a #24 research ranking in 2014, #24 in 2015, #16 in 2016, #7 in 2017, #3 in 2018, #7 in 2019, #6 in 2020 and #4 in 2021.

Over the past five years, Foster’s average research ranking is #5.4 in the world.

Squad strength

The Foster School’s faculty has excelled in all those disciplines. Each of Foster’s academic departments currently ranks among the top 15 in a variety of research area rankings.

The Foster Department of Management and Organization ranks #4 in the nation in research productivity from 2015 to 2019, according to the most recent 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 over a five-year period.

Foster’s Department of Accounting ranks #10 in the world (#8 in the US) for its studies published across 12 accounting journals over the past six years (2015-2020), according to the annual Brigham Young University (Marriott) Accounting Rankings (based on preliminary data through 2020). Over the same period, Foster Accounting also ranks #3 in financial accounting research.

The Foster School’s Department of Finance faculty in 2018.

The Foster Department of Finance and Business Economics is ranked #10 for research prowess in the 2020 Academic Ranking of World Universities, which weighs publications in top journals, citations, per-capita academic performance and other indicators of research excellence for the period between 2014 and 2018. Foster also generated the #15 most publications in the top four finance journals between 2014 and 2019, according to the Finance Ranking Index, maintained by Arizona State University (Carey).

The Foster School’s Department of Marketing and International Business registers at #11 in the Top 100 Business School Research Rankings (compiled by UT Dallas), based on its 2016-2020 publication record in the four top marketing journals considered in the index.

And Foster’s Department of Information Systems and Operations Management comes in at #13 in the Top 100 Business School Research Rankings for its 2018-2020 publication rate across eight journals tracked.

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