One-Percenters: Foster faculty among the most-cited scientific researchers in the world

A Stanford University study has counted seven faculty members of the University of Washington Foster School of Business among the top 1% of the world’s most-cited researchers, across all scientific disciplines. Nine Foster professors are in the top 1.5%.

This new index of scholarly influence, published in the journal PLOS Biology, was constructed from a sweeping analysis of citation data from 1996 to 2019 on the research of 6,880,389 scientists who have published at least five papers in any of 22 major disciplines, ranging from biology to engineering to economics to management. The database lists the top 2% of scholars—more than 100,000 names in total.

Among the top 1.5% of the planet’s most-cited researchers are Bruce Avolio, Suresh Kotha, Charles Hill, Terence Mitchell, Thomas Jones and Xiao-Ping Chen from Foster’s Department of Management and Organization; Jonathan Karpoff and Jarrad Harford from the Department of Finance and Business Economics; and Robert Palmatier from the Department of Marketing and International Business.

The highest-rated member of Foster’s contingent is Bruce Avolio, a professor of management and the Mark Pigott Chair in Business Strategic Leadership. Avolio, an authority in leadership development, is ranked in the top 0.06% of most-cited scientific researchers overall, and #25 among the 36,319 researchers in the category of business & management.

Avolio is the founding executive director of Foster’s Center for Leadership and Strategic Thinking, and the author of nearly 150 published papers and over a dozen books. He is the recipient of the 2013 Eminent Leadership Scholar Award from the Academy of Management’s Network of Leadership Scholars.

A 2019 study in The Leadership Quarterly ranked Avolio the #1 scholar in the world at connecting authors in the field of leadership research, and #2 in productivity and influence of his leadership studies. An index published that same year in the journal Academy of Management Learning and Education listed Avolio the #3 most-influential author in the field of organizational behavior. And a 2008 Journal of Management study ranked him the #133 most-influential management scholar of all time—a position that would surely advance if it were recalculated today.