Research powerhouse: Foster faculty ranks #7 in the world
The Financial Times has ranked the UW Foster School of Business faculty #7 in the world, #6 in the nation and #1 among public universities for research productivity.
This research index, a factor in the paper’s “2017 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 #7 spot globally, in a tie with Columbia and MIT, the Foster School vaulted nine spots from last year’s FT research ranking. Foster faculty were more productive per capita than counterparts at UC Berkeley, Michigan, Chicago, Northwestern, Duke, Yale and many other prominent business schools.
Thought leaders
Financial Times is not the only rating of intellectual horsepower in which the Foster School features prominently, both as an overall research faculty and in several specific disciplines.
The Foster School ranks #22 in North America and #23 in the world according to the latest “Top 100 Business School Research Rankings,” compiled by the University of Texas at Dallas. Unlike the per capital weighting of the FT listing, the UT index tracks the total number of papers published by each school’s faculty in the leading 24 business journals, across disciplines, over a five-year period. Despite being comparatively small, the extraordinarily productive Foster research faculty fueled a climb of nine places in the 2011-2015 ranking, published last January.
The current “Academic Ranking of World Universities” rates the UW #24 in the world and #21 in the nation in business and economics research. This ranking, compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, takes into account each school’s number of major prize winners, scholarly publications, citations, and percentage of papers published in top journals (where Foster and the UW rates a 93.3 out of 100).
Discipline rankings
The Foster School’s Department of Management & Organization faculty is listed #5 nationally in the current “Management Department Productivity Ranking,” which is published annually by Texas A&M University. This raw rather than weighted ranking measures each school’s total number of studies published in the eight most-important management journals during the year 2015.
Foster’s Department of Finance and Business Economics generated the 5th most publications in the top four finance journals over the period from 2014 to 2015, according to the “Finance Ranking Index” which is maintained by Arizona State University.
The Foster Department of Accounting ranks #30 in the world in total number of studies published in 12 peer-reviewed accounting journals between 1990 and 2016, according to the forthcoming Brigham Young University Accounting Rankings, which compile data on scholarly production in the field. Foster has been especially prolific in the area of financial accounting, where it ranks #13 in the world over the past six years, and managerial accounting, where it ranks #23 in the world over the past six years.
And though there is no independent ranking of marketing research, Foster’s Department of Marketing & International Business recently conducted its own competitive analysis and found itself #8 among the nation’s public universities in publishing productivity in the discipline’s top journals, and #6 in terms of career productivity per research professor.
