Thought Leaders: Foster faculty among the elite in scholarly rankings

There are many more—and more celebrated—rankings of business school programs than of the faculty who deliver those programs.

But a few empirical ratings of intellectual horsepower do exist. And the University of Washington Foster School of Business features prominently, both as an entire research faculty and in several specific disciplines.

Most recently, The Financial Times ranked the Foster faculty 16^th in the world, 13^th in the nation and 4^th among public universities in research productivity. This number, a factor in the paper’s “2016 Global MBA Ranking,” is derived by tallying the number of research articles published by a school’s faculty in the top 45 scholarly business journals, representing every discipline. The ranking is weighted to reflect the relative size of each faculty.

And even when there is no per capita weighting, the comparatively small Foster School faculty ranks 22^nd in North America and 23^rd in the world in the latest “Top 100 Business School Research Rankings,” compiled annually by the University of Texas at Dallas. The UT index tracks the number of papers published by each school’s faculty in the leading 24 business journals, across disciplines, over a five year period. Foster’s particularly prolific 2015 fueled a climb of nine places for the 2011-2015 ranking which was published January 19.

The current “Academic Ranking of World Universities” rates the UW 24^th in the world and 21^st 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 rated a 93.3 out of 100).

Discipline rankings

The Foster School’s Department of Management and Organization faculty is listed 2^nd nationally in the latest “Management Department Productivity Ranking,” which is published by Texas A&M University. Only the Wharton School faculty published more studies in the eight most-important management journals in the year 2014, the most recent year tabulated.

Foster’s Department of Finance and Business Economics generated the 8^th most publications in the top four finance journals, according to the most recent “Finance Ranking Index” which is maintained by Arizona State University.

The Foster Department of Accounting ranks 27^th in the world in number of studies published in 12 peer-reviewed accounting journals between 1990 and 2015, according to Brigham Young University’s “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 15^th in the world over the past six years, and 14^th since 1990.

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^th among the nation’s public universities in publishing productivity in the discipline’s top journals, and 6^th in terms of career productivity per research professor.