I enjoy measures of academic productivity. Many of my colleagues are suspicious. To be fair, they often have reasonable concerns. Judging the performance of marketing academics is hard. Many measures are of debatable accuracy. Still, I don’t see that as a reason to give up on them. Without measures, we are left with subjectivity.
The Problem Of Subjectivity: You Look Right For The Job
Subjectivity only rewards insiders at the expense of outsiders. Those who look right get the job regardless of achievements or ability. A better solution to poor measurement is trying more measures and improving those we have. We can try and understand which measures work for which purpose. Ideally, we might use multiple measures. Even if no measure is perfect if you are succeeding in most of them you are probably doing something right. The theory is that the errors in multiple measures should balance out providing each method has different errors.
In this light, I read Soutar, Wilkinson, and Young’s analysis of the research performance of marketing academics. These Australian-based scholars wanted to know how schools stack up.
The results provide an objective measure of research impact and provide benchmarks that can be used by governments, universities and individual academics to compare research impact.
Soutar, Wilkinson, and Young, 2015, page 155
Judging The Performance Of Marketing Academics
The authors created a “hg” index using Google Scholar metrics. The hg index is the geometric mean of the h index and the g index.
The h-index is the number of papers that have at least that number of cites, so that an h-index of 10 indicates an author has published 10 papers with 10 or more citations. The g-index is the rank number value of articles g for which there are g squared number of citations.
Soutar, Wilkinson, and Young, 2015, page 156
To measure departments they took the average score of full professors. Only assessing groups with four of more full professors reduces the impact of outliers a little. The big reveal is that Cardiff is the best group in the world. While Cardiff is a good business school I think few would think it the best in the world. Still, Cardiff is likely doing something right so good luck to them.
The authors also conclude that Australian universities are doing well.
These are encouraging results that suggest ANZ universities are performing well, with 75% of these universities scoring above the mean and median.
Soutar, Wilkinson, and Young, 2015, page 158
This is interesting but let’s get a few more metrics before being too confident that we have measurement perfected.
For more on what makes a good academic see here, here, and here.
Read: Geoffrey N. Soutar, Ian Wilkinson, and Louise Young, (2015) Research performance of marketing academics and departments: An international comparison, Australasian Marketing Journal, 23, pages 155-161.