Critical Evaluation of Environmental, Social and Governance Disclosures of Malaysian Property and Construction Companies

There is an increasing demand from stakeholders for higher transparency on environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosures. Yet not much is known about the state of sustainability reporting in Malaysia especially in the property and construction industry. This paper aims to fill this gap accordingly. Content analysis of corporate websites, sustainability and annual reports was adopted as the main methodology in this study. Findings show that corporate governance indicators are most reported by Malaysian construction companies compared to other environmental or social indicators. It was also found that details on actual health and safety performance of these companies and the initiatives implemented were largely absent from their reporting. Given the increasing number of rating tools in the capital markets which serve to rank and file companies based on their sustainability disclosures and performance such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) and FTSE4Good Index, it is questionable as to how reliable this can be done for the Malaysian property and construction market. The paper will be useful to construction management practitioners and ESG analysts with a focus on Asian markets

Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance

There are several methods for ranking the scholarly performance of law faculties, including reputation surveys (U.S. News, Leiter); publication counts (Lindgren and Seltzer, Leiter); and citation counts (Eisenberg and Wells, Leiter). Each offers a useful but partial picture offaculty performance. We explore here whether the new beta SSRN-based measures (number of downloads and number ofposted papers) can offer a different, also useful, albeit also partial, picture. Our modest claim is that SSRNbased measures can address some of the deficiencies in these other measures and thus play a valuable role in the rankings tapestry. For example, SSRN offers real-time data covering most American law schools and many foreign law schools, while citation and publication counts appear sporadically and cover a limited number of U.S. schools. The SSRN measures favor work with audiences across disciplines and across countries, while other measures are more law-centric and U.S.-centric. SSRN is relatively new and thus favors younger scholars and improving schools, while other measures favor more established scholars and schools. At the same time, the SSRN measures have important field and other biases, as well as gaming risks. We assess the correlations among the different measures, both on an aggregate and on a per-faculty member basis. We find that all measures are strongly correlated; that total and per faculty measures are highly correlated; and that SSRN measures based on number of papers are highly correlated with measures based on number of downloads. Among major schools, all measures also correlate with school size. Symposium: The Next Generation of Law School Rankings held April 15, 2005 at Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington

Academics' online presence guidelines: A four step guide to taking control of your visibility

OpenUCT published Academics' online presence guidelines: A four step guide to taking control of your visibility in 2012

Using the Social Science Research Network to Aid and to Promote Research

The Social Science Research Network is a depository for academic scholarship. SSRN allows academic papers and abstracts to be accessible worldwide. Most papers may be downloaded from the SSRN database free of charge, but some links are to commercial sites. Posting papers to SSRN and subscribing to its site are not inherently complicated. However, it is possible for academic departments, particularly law schools, to use SSRN more efficiently and more flexibly than SSRN's architects envisaged. For instance, one can establish a faculty working paper series with archived issues that are forever easily accessible, a much cheaper manner of establishing a working paper series than traditional ways, and a more permanent format than envisaged by standard SSRN systems. This article explains how SSRN works and how it can be used more effectively

Genesis of Altmetrics or Article-level Metrics for Measuring Efficacy of Scholarly Communications: Current Perspectives

The article-level metrics (ALMs) or altmetrics becomes a new trendsetter in recent times for measuring the impact of scientific publications and their social outreach to intended audiences. The popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin and social bookmarks such as Mendeley and CiteULike are nowadays widely used for communicating research to larger transnational audiences. In 2012, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment got signed by the scientific and researchers communities across the world. This declaration has given preference to the ALM or altmetrics over traditional but faulty journal impact factor (JIF)-based assessment of career scientists. JIF does not consider impact or influence beyond citations count as this count reflected only through Thomson Reuters' Web of Science database. Furthermore, JIF provides indicator related to the journal, but not related to a published paper. Thus, altmetrics now becomes an alternative metrics for performance assessment of individual scientists and their contributed scholarly publications. This paper provides a glimpse of genesis of altmetrics in measuring efficacy of scholarly communications and highlights available altmetric tools and social platforms linking altmetric tools, which are widely used in deriving altmetric scores of scholarly publications. The paper thus argues for institutions and policy makers to pay more attention to altmetrics based indicators for evaluation purpose but cautions that proper safeguards and validations are needed before their adoption

Effective Strategies for Increasing Citation Frequency

Due to the effect of citation impact on The Higher Education (THE) world university ranking system, most of the researchers are looking for some helpful techniques to increase their citation record. This paper by reviewing the relevant articles extracts 33 different ways for increasing the citations possibilities. The results show that the article visibility has tended to receive more download and citations. This is probably the first study to collect over 30 different ways to improve the citation record. Further study is needed to explore and expand these techniques in specific fields of study in order to make the results more precisely.Available online: http://ssrn.com/abstract=234458

Will an Institutional Repository Hurt My SSRN Ranking? Calming the Faculty Fear

Faculty members should not view the institutional repository as a drain on their SSRN rankings. While SSRN excels at delivering their work to the cadre of legal specialists, IRs typically do a better job of presenting it to a broader readership. This expanded exposure should be judged a positive benefit of participation in the IR, helping to mitigate criticisms of law faculty as sequestered, insular, and writing only for themselves. Anyone interested in giving their ideas the widest possible hearing should deposit their intellectual work in as many venues as possible. For law professors, this means they should have both SSRN and the IR working for them