Contributing institutions and authors in international business research: a quality-based assessment.
| Verfasser | Xu, Nianhang |
| Posten | RESEARCH ARTICLE - Report |
Abstract We use a quality-based approach to assess contributing institutions and authors in international business (IB) research. Specifically, we use Google Scholar citations of individual articles to weigh the number of IB research articles in core IB and other non-IB elite journals. Our approach mitigates concerns about the quality difference among articles across different journals and within individual journals. We find evidence to suggest that IB research in the European and Asia-Pacific regions exhibits an upward trend over the 1995-2011 period. With respect to institutional research quality, we document that an IB program with faculty members working with their peers in foreign countries and the presence of a doctoral program can enhance an institution's research quality. Prolific authors are very mobile and typically have global experience.
Keywords Ranking * Citations * International business
1 Introduction
Research assessment of academic institutions and authors is of interest among many university constituents, such as faculty members, administrators, donors, alumni, students, and policy makers. As suggested in the literature, the findings from these assessments are useful for making decisions on merit pay raises, tenure and promotion decisions, resource allocation, enrollment, donations, grant applications, and employment, among others.
Recently, there has been renewed interest in research assessment in international business (IB). Several studies, such as Trevino et al. (2010) and Lahiri and Kumar (2012), provide updates and extensions to the literature. The IB research assessment literature, while interesting, seldom addresses the quality difference among articles across different journals and within individual journals. The present study is the "first" to use citations in each published article to weigh scholars' research output to assess the contributing scholars and institutions in IB research. The quality-based performance metric is called weighted normalized citations (WNCs).
Some of the literature offers insights into the geographical analyses of research productivity and compare their results to the popular ranking results, such as those of U.S. News and World Report (e.g., Trevino et al. 2010). However, the literature seldom explores the drivers behind institutional research performance and job mobility among prolific IB scholars. The present study fills this gap.
Our paper relates to but differs from the current literature in two aspects. First, following the approach to ranking finance journals in Chan et al. (2013), we document that the numbers of citations, as a proxy for quality, for different articles within the same IB journal vary widely. This finding echoes the findings in Smith (2004), who documents that a top (good but not top) journal may have articles with no/low (large) citations. In other words, not all articles in the same journal are the same in terms of their quality. Hence, we contend that the common approach of simply tallying the total number or coauthor-weighted number of contributing institutions and authors for all articles in IB and related journals may not account for quality differences across journals and across different articles within individual journals. To overcome this challenge, we use citations received by each article as the weights to each publication to provide a quality-based assessment of IB research among institutions and authors. Our new findings compliment the literature. Our approach emphasizes the quality, not the quantity, of articles by institution and author. Second, our study offers a multiple regression model to explain the variation in research performance in terms of quality by institution. In addition, we provide a brief employment history of leading authors to shed light on the job mobility of IB scholars.
We offer several interesting findings. First, the leading IB journal, Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS), has the highest mean normalized citation of 15.05 times (citations adjusted for article age) among all seven core IB journals. Among the IB-related articles in a set of non-IB elite journals in other business disciplines (accounting, finance, management, marketing, and information systems), the mean normalized citation is 29.88 times. The difference in means in JIBS and other non-IB elite journals suggests that many high-impact IB articles appeared in non-IB elite journals. Second, the standard deviations of normalized citations across different IB journals and IB articles in other non-IB elite journals are not small, and in fact, some articles even receive no citations. This finding suggests that not all articles in the same journal have the same quality. Third, leading institutions and authors in IB research are not concentrated in a particular region (e.g., North America, Europe, or Asia-Pacific). Rather, they are spread out widely across three major geographic regions. Our results echo the general findings in Ellis and Zhan (2011), who conclude that there is geographic diversity in IB research. Fourth, Harvard University, University of South Carolina, University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, and Uppsala University are the top five institutions according to our research quality metric. Specifically, Harvard University is ranked first by publishing 66 articles and the University of Chicago is in 4th place by publishing 12 articles during the study period. Both institutions published high impact articles. Our results differ from those in the literature.
Yadong Luo, John Dunning, Julian Birkinshaw, Geert Bekaert, and Paul Beamish are the top five authors. Many of these leading authors had prior experience from other institutions in other countries, suggesting that they are highly mobile and able to draw on their experience in other countries across their careers. In addition, our trend analysis indicates that, while North American institutions had a large impact on IB research in the mid-1990s, European and Asia-Pacific institutions exhibit an upward trend in IB research in terms of research quality during the 1995-2011 period. We find that an institution's effort to collaborate with foreign institutions and the presence of a doctoral program are positively correlated with research performance. In contrast, an institution with a stand-alone IB department is negatively correlated with research performance.
The next section of the paper presents a literature review. Next, the research methods are described. After the results are discussed, the paper discusses their implications and limitations.
2 Literature Review
The literature on assessment of research by institution and author are rich. Therefore, we primarily discuss the IB-related literature and supplement with a few studies in other disciplines. In general, there are four approaches to do the assessment. The first is a survey approach. Ball and McCulloch (1984, 1988) use survey to obtain opinions from various constituents to rank IB programs. Nehrt (1987) conducts a survey to focus on the ranking of master IB programs in the US. Surveys, while useful, draw criticisms due to the subjective nature of the survey designs and the respondents' opinions. The second approach is to use some indirect representations. For instance, Chan et al. (2005) use editorial memberships of faculty in major IB journals to rank IB programs. This approach, while interesting, does not directly access the performance of IB programs. The third approach is to use citations. Chandy and Williams (1994) use a citation analysis approach to rank the most cited authors in JIBS over 5- and 10-year periods. Chan et al. (2009) closely examine citations in published articles in four IB journals [JIBS, Journal of World Business (JWB), International Business Review (IBR), and Management International Review (MIR)] during 2000 to 2004 to rank influential institutions.
The last approach is to measure the research output. Morrison and Inkpen (1991) use articles only from JIBS and Columbia Journal of World Business (now JWB) and IB articles in seven other major business journals to conduct their assessment during 1980 to 1989. They count the number of publications to provide the ranking. Inkpen and Beamish (1994) conduct their assessment using only articles published in JIBS over the period 1970-1994. Kumar and Kundu (2004) and Chan et al. (2006) update the literature. Kumar and Kundu (2004) use publication records in JIBS, JWB, and MIR over the 1991-2000 period, while Chan et al. (2006) include IBR in addition to JIBS, JWB, and MIR for the 1995-2004 period. Xu et al. (2008) conduct another round of assessment of IB institutions and authors. Unlike other studies, Xu et al. (2008) include Journal of International Marketing (JIMkt), and International Marketing Review (IMR) in addition to JIBS, JWB, MIR, and IBR. Xu et al. (2008) use the number of prolific authors in an institution as a performance metric to rank IB institutions. Using the four core IB journals (JIBS, JWB, MIR, and IBR) and JIMkt, IMR, Journal of International Management (JIMgt) and all IB articles in non-IB elite business journals, Trevino et al. (2010) offer a comprehensive analysis of IB institutions and authors. Specifically, they use journal impact factors and adjusted total pages of an article in addition to the number of coauthors to calculate a weighted score for each institution and author as the ranking metric. Lahiri and Kumar (2012) conduct a straightforward update of Kumar and Kundu (2004) using publication data only from JIBS, JWB, and MIR during the 2001-2010 period. This research output approach is the most popular because it is a direct counting of research output and it allows additional analyses. We follow this approach to conduct our assessment and augmenting it by citations in each published article.
We summarize the most recent studies for research output approach in Table 1 in terms of year...
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