a link about the B school ranking based on publication

[hhjj]

UTD Top 100 Business School Research Rankings - School of Management @ UT Dallas

can we trust this?

[desimba]

Of course, we can trust these rankings for what they are supposed to measure => if someone were to repeat the exercise by considering the number of papers published in a certain set of journals during a certain period of time and attribute the authorship to universities in a particular manner then I am sure s/he would land with results similar to what UT Dallas has and hence to that extent, we should trust the rankings in the sense that they are not fabricated or made-up. Having said that I personally would not agree with the rankings that are presented here IF THEY ARE MEANT TO BE A REFLECTION OF THE STRENGTH OF THEIR PHD PROGRAMS. Some of the most glaring inconsistencies that I see are:

University of Maryland at College Park at #7;
Stanford University GSB at #11 &
the worst of them all, Haas @ California Berkeley at #25.

Frankly either the rankings of US News or Business Week would align more closely with what people generally believe are the rankings of the strengths of the PhD programs.

The best measure which one might have to construct on his/ her own for the discipline one is interested in is to look at the placements of the students graduating from a program in a certain period of time and weight them in a particular way, e.g. tenure-track faculty position at HBS > tenure-track faculty position at UT Dallas > non-tenure track faculty position at NCSU (or some such order!)

[shootermcgavin7]

It appears to rank by ALL journals.............not sure if I would choose a specialty program (Accounting, Management, Finance) based on a general ranking.

[AstralTraveller]

Originally Posted by shootermcgavin7

It appears to rank by ALL journals.............not sure if I would choose a specialty program (Accounting, Management, Finance) based on a general ranking.

First of all, I know that the WP Carey school has a ranking for Finance programs.

About general bus schools rankings: The problem is that an applicant might be toying with several similarly oriented programs, and for that, there is need for a "pooled" ranking for PhD programs in Business. It is not unusual to see people applying to Strategy at one place, Bus Econ at another, and Operations or Accounting at the third, especially when you are considering IO as your main specialty. Depending on the faculty's research strengths, somebody might want to do such an application, and end up needing a general ranking to help him/her organize priorities, alongside with individual faculty research interests.

Just my .

[halcyon_daze]

Originally Posted by shootermcgavin7

It appears to rank by ALL journals.............not sure if I would choose a specialty program (Accounting, Management, Finance) based on a general ranking.

To get more insight into the publishing record by specialty you can actually do a selection by journal. So if you're interested in an accounting program, for example, you can select the top accounting journals only and see the order the schools come up in. It can fine tune the data somewhat, but I would still interpret the results with caution as it does not give any visibility into placement record. I also agree that faculty research areas is an important criteria for school selection.

Cheers!

[AstralTraveller]

Is there any Business PhD Ranking, split by specialties or not, which contemplates placements upong graduation?

[halcyon_daze]

Originally Posted by AstralTraveller

Is there any Business PhD Ranking, split by specialties or not, which contemplates placements upong graduation?

You can look at the FT MBA rankings and add the Phd-specific categories to the list of fields displayed. One of them is research (pubs) and the other is placements. There's a brief description of the methodology for each of the columns. You can sort by either column; however, I do find some of the rankings a little suspect as far as placement is concerned. There's a UK-based school that appears right at the top of the list and they seem to have more of a distance/DBA type program than an actual PhD. That said, all of the usual suspects (e.g. Harvard, Wharton, MIT) appear about where one would expect them to!

[AstralTraveller]

Thank you, halcyon_daze

[moomber123]

I would defend the UT Dallas ranking in the following:

1.) You can actually select the journals of interest to rank the program. Therefore, the argument that ranking based on all journals does not reflect good ranking for a specialty is not valid. However, the journal selection might be limited. For example, only MISQ, ISR, and perhaps Management Science are included, which for MIS's ranking purposes, might be too few. Some students with technical orientation might want to see rankings based on IEEE, ACM, and other engineering-like outlets as well.

2.) There is a huge flaw to base the assessment of a PhD program strength on placement. Sure, placement record reflects a certain sense of reputation or tradition, but it reflects them at most in an indirect manner. Just because so and so went to this program, and did well and landed a good placement doesn't mean when another individual, equally qualified or not, would end up in the same placement if s/he attends the same program. This is like a research design issue, you want to measure the "source" of the strength of the program, not one indirect indicator (at best). One can always argue that the source of strength in an academic place is publication record. This of course, needs to be taken with some other consideration in place as well. Just because you attend a program where the faculty members publish like crazy, it doesn't mean they necessarily would include you in that process in a meaningful way. You can be a meaningful participant as a RA if the faculty members are willing to "show you the rope" or include you in a substantive manner, or it is also possible that you are just there doing the dirty data prep job that a high school kid with Excel skill can do. The result can be quite different. So I would suggest taking that publication ranking along with some inside details of the program you gather by talking to current students.

3.) The cited ranking for Berkeley, Stanford, etc might appear to deviate from out expectation because they are such reputation in MBA ranking, but I actually would not be too surprised. Of course, I agree their ranking also strike me as being lower than expected, but I would no longer think of these schools as being at the very top of business research. Take Berkeley for example (I am very hippie-oriented, so I love the school, if there is any bias I have, it's in Berkeley's favor), Williamson and Teece, etc, are such paramount figure in strategy, and one would expect Berkeley to rank high in strategy as a result. But one also needs to know that Williamson is emeritus now, and Teece is also slowing down in publication. One only needs to survey the recent publications (the past 5 years) in SMJ to realize that Berkeley is no longer the powerhouse it used to be in that particular area. Yes, reputation-wise, having a Berkeley degree would help, A LOT. And if I had the choice, I would probably disregard the ranking and go to Cal. But if I want to find a tenure-track job and hope to publish in a certain set of journals so I can actually GET that tenure, then this ranking from UT Dallas actually is probably the most objective ranking one can ever get. Don't be surprised to find example of Berkeley graduate landing a tenure-track job at places that expect certain publications for tenure, but end up failing to get tenure. I personally know of a few examples. Schools, especially below 25th ranking places, love to get Berkeley graduates because of the reputation, but then realize the publication is not working out as expected. Subsequently, the placement did not translate into actual tenure.

4.) The reality of business academia is not well reflected in the ranking, or any other rankings one might find. And that certain reality is not well known among junior doctoral students or people outside of the community. One obvious, related reality is that MBA ranking has much smaller correlation with PhD quality. Many people know this, but still can't resist the reputation effect of a strong or poor MBA program. For example, those considering an MIS program might initially feel hesitant abut Georgia State or UT Dallas, because those schools don't have top ranking MBA programs, or top ranking overall school reputation. One might easily think a much more reputable school like Wisconsin-Madison would be a better place. But if you pick Wisconsin over Georgia State or UT Dallas, many MIS insiders would laugh at you. In that sense, the publication-based ranking reflects the true "preference" of doctoral students quite well, placing Georgia State and UT Dallas on top.

What is less known or less obvious is the fact that placement in business academia is a far less straightforward business than one might expect. It is not a simple matter of your publication record and the ranking of the program you attend that determines your eventual placement. Business departments are actually extremely "clique-ish." For example, Harvard graduates might feel on top of the world, but outside a select few departments, Harvard graduates might not have easier time looking for job because Harvard's unusual approach to business research (an almost exclusive case study orientation, which many scholars would argue to lack rigor). Conversely, if you are not graduate of MIT, Harvard, etc, you probably will never get into Harvard no matter how well you do. It is a place well known (if not infamous) for in-breeding, generally considered to be a bad practice in academia. The advice I'd give is that knowing those "clique" would guide your decision much better than any ranking. If you are confident that you will get placed at top tier school in a particular small "clique" like Harvard, Chicago, or Northwestern, sure, go for it. But if you are not so sure, you certainly don't want to risk it and then end up struggling because other top tier "clique" departments will never touch you coming out of certain departments.

Another "clique-ish" behavior is how business schools think of themselves. Berkeley, Chicago, for example, tend to think of business school as a serious, rigorous academic institutions, not unlike economics departments. In that sense, they tend to focus on doing the "orthodox" economics research, and focus on journals that the traditional economics departments would consider top. For example, RAND Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, etc, these are journals where Chicago people tend to focus on, which are not even included in the UTD list. The reason is actually quite simple - the rest of the business research community simply don't concern themselves too much with such a rigorous treatment of "business research" as a branch of "orthodox" economics. Therefore, if you go for program at those places, you are likely to be more like an "economist" than "management scholar." Nothing wrong with that, it's a matter of choice. It is just that ranking of business PhD programs would not be able to reflect that at all. My personal preference is to stay away from such a rigorous treatment of economics in business research. First of all, well, I simply don't think I can compete with orthodox economists. So instead of trying to assert some statement of academic legitimacy, I choose to stay away from area I don't have expertise in. Secondly, and this is not an excuse, I believe that management scholars need to differentiate ourselves from economists. We should not concern ourselves too much with coming up with a grand theory that is internally consistent or mathematically rigorous. I would argue, with the risk of over-generalizing, that those are the main concerns for the "orthodox" economists. Rather, I believe our role is to combine and apply multi-disciplinary methods from all aspects of organizational management, which would include economics, sociology, political science, psychology, and so on, so that we can be in the position to "inform" managerial professionals in a relevant manner. What is the use of specializing in fundamental mathematical properties of advanced econometrics methods when our future MBA students are unlikely to see value in them? Therefore, I am not so bothered by the UTD ranking that put Berkeley at 25 or so, or Chicago in similar range. I am not asserting that such a ranking truly reflects their academic strength. I simply think that such a ranking reflects the true strength for those departments that choose to focus on the more managerially oriented issues that the set of journals UTD compiled would focus on.

Subtle issues like these would not be reflected in ANY ranking at all, and our general perception based on reputation of a school or department would certainly be a far worse indicator. In that sense, the best we can do is look at objective ranking like UT Dallas, and infer the best ranking to individual research orientation. However, it is almost certainly too much to ask newbie to know which set of journals s/he should focus on to rank programs.

Perhaps, a worthwhile efforts by people from the "inside" is to list the set of journals that the particular program s/he is already in, or even current faculty members, that the department considers "A journal" for tenure purposes. And then newbies can take that information and do an objective ranking like UT Dallas to make the most informed decision.

For example, if you want to tenure at UT Dallas for MIS, you are almost certain to be expected publication at MISQ, ISR, JMIS, etc. But at Arizona, for the same discipline, IEEE, DSS, ACM, Management Science, would be considered the A journals to go for. However you rank UT Dallas and Arizona need to reflect that difference. Similarly, for strategy, SMJ, AMJ, AMR, ASQ, Org Science, might be the A journals at Minnesota, but other places might think more highly of HBR, Sloan, etc that Minnesota would consider "too practitioner oriented" (an academic way of nicely saying not good enough).

[macroeconomicus]

Many business school faculties and class sizes are so small, that the rankings should not be trusted beyond the top 10 to 15 places or so. The rest of the ranking is just useless noise. A couple of key faculty members moving from one finance department to another could make the rankings jump like crazy. Next, since the faculties in most business phd programs are so small, you ABSOLUTELY have to examine their resumes, what they're doing, etc if you're trying to decide where to apply or enroll. Even when some ranking says that two schools have the same rank, your personal evaluation will probably be such that one school clearly dominates the other.. so I don't know why people from these forums bother with these rankings really.