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Research rankings of Asia Pacific business schools: Global versus local knowledge strategies

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Abstract

Despite the increasing recognition of the importance of the research mission of universities, no previous work has investigated the research productivity and research strategies of Asia Pacific business schools. This article fills this important gap by conducting the first study to rank the publication productivity of 130 Asia Pacific business schools. Drawing on data from the UTD Top 100 Business School Research Rankings™ and several additional sources, we rank Asia Pacific business schools’ research productivity in three areas: (1) twenty-four leading business journals, (2) seven top management journals, and (3) five Asia Pacific management journals. We also extend this analysis by documenting the distinct publishing strategies of various Asia Pacific business schools—global, local, or both.

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Notes

  1. For example, of the 4,387 postsecondary educational institutions in the United States recognized by the Carnegie Foundation in 2002, only 163 (3.71%) had PhD-granting status in the full range of disciplines and only 89 (2.03%) were ranked in the highest category of “Research I.”

  2. The database is interactive and continuously updated as new research is published. See Appendix 1.

  3. Publications in Manufacturing & Service Operations and Management are tracked starting in 1999, when it published its first volume.

  4. Although Hofstede (2007) would probably consider Israel and Turkey as “Asian,” schools in Israel have been considered in rankings of research productivity among European schools (Baden-Fuller et al., 2000) and schools in Turkey have not been active in publishing in these 24 journals. Therefore, we have excluded schools in Israel and Turkey.

  5. In the Asia Pacific Journal of Management during the period 1997-2006, the top ten institutional contributors were (1) NUS, (2) CUHK, (3) Lingnan University, Hong Kong, (4) City University of Hong Kong, (5) Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, (6) Hong Kong Baptist University, (7) HKUST, (8 tied) Concordia University, Canada, (8 tied) Xi’an Jiaotong University, China, (10 tied) Ohio State University, USA, and (10 tied) Thunderbird, USA (Pleggenkuhle-Miles et al., 2007: 475).

  6. As of 2002, NUS transferred its editorial control of the Asia Pacific Journal of Management to the Asia Academy of Management (Lau, 2007; Peng, 2007).

  7. We suspect that the reward system in Australia may play a role. Australia’s Department of Education, Science, and Training (DEST) point system rewards quantity regardless of the outlets (Harzing, 2005; Yang & Terjesen, 2007: 503). This may explain the significant interest among Australian authors in Asia Pacific outlets.

  8. In some disciplines, Asia Pacific business schools now rank very high. In international business, five Asia Pacific business schools are now in the global top 20, led by CUHK (sixth in the world—see Xu et al., 2008).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fox School of Business, Temple University, Speakman Hall (006-00), Philadelphia, PA, 19122, USA

    Ram Mudambi

  2. School of Business, University of Reading, Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AA, UK

    Ram Mudambi

  3. School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas, P.O. Box 830688, SM 43, Richardson, TX, 75083, USA

    Mike W. Peng & David H. Weng

Authors
  1. Ram Mudambi
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  2. Mike W. Peng
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  3. David H. Weng
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mike W. Peng.

Additional information

This research was supported, in part, by the Perelman Senior Research Fellowship at Temple, the Provost’s Distinguished Professorship at UTD, and the National Science Foundation (CAREER SES 0552089). We thank Andrew Delios for helping us collect data and for his hands-on editorial assistance. We also thank Dave Ahlstrom and Anne-Wil Harzing for helpful comments and Ted Khoury, Kenny Oh, and Sylvia Yen for research assistance. We are grateful to Dean Hasan Pirkul for granting us permission to use data from the UTD Top 100 Business School Research Rankings™. All views expressed are ours and not those of the underwriters.

Appendices

Appendix 1

The Database for the UTD Top 100 Business School Research Rankings™

The UTD Top 100 Business School Research Rankings™ (http://top100.utdallas.edu) is a database that reports publications in 24 leading business journals (see Table 1). It covers the period between 1990 and the present, and is being updated on a continuing basis as new research is published. It produces two rankings—North America and worldwide.

Single-authored paper is counted as one publication for a university, and research contributed by more than one author is weighted by the number of authors in the paper. As such, the rankings can reflect universities’ academic output in an accurate, objective manner. These rankings are not adjusted for faculty size, due to the difficulties in accurately measuring faculty size.

The database is highly interactive and flexible. It not only allows users to get the list of particular journals (such as operations management journals), but also enables researchers to sort out the publication of a university, a scholar, or a particular title (“SEARCH” by school name, author name, and article title, respectively). To get the first top 100 rankings listed in Appendix 2 (1990),

  1. 1.

    Go to “Rankings by journal,” and select “check all journals” (any single journal or any combination of the 24 journals can also be selected)

  2. 2.

    Select time “from 1990” and “to 1990” (it is possible to select any year or any combination of certain years since 1990)

  3. 3.

    Click “worldwide” (the other alternative is “North America”)

Appendix 2

UTD Top 100 Business School Research Worldwide Rankings™

Table 7
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Mudambi, R., Peng, M.W. & Weng, D.H. Research rankings of Asia Pacific business schools: Global versus local knowledge strategies. Asia Pacific J Manage 25, 171–188 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-008-9086-3

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