Identifying Research Fields within Business and Management: A Journal Cross-Citation Analysis

A discipline such as business and management (B&M) is very broad and has many fields within it, ranging from fairly scientific ones such as management science or economics to softer ones such as information systems. There are at least three reasons why it is important to identify these sub-fields accurately. Firstly, to give insight into the structure of the subject area and identify perhaps unrecognised commonalities; second for the purpose of normalizing citation data as it is well known that citation rates vary significantly between different disciplines. And thirdly, because journal rankings and lists tend to split their classifications into different subjects – for example, the Association of Business Schools (ABS) list, which is a standard in the UK, has 22 different fields. Unfortunately, at the moment these are created in an ad hoc manner with no underlying rigour. The purpose of this paper is to identify possible sub-fields in B&M rigorously based on actual citation patterns. We have examined 450 journals in B&M which are included in the ISI Web of Science (WoS) and analysed the cross-citation rates between them enabling us to generate sets of coherent and consistent sub-fields that minimise the extent to which journals appear in several categories. Implications and limitations of the analysis are discussed

Data mining for scientific publications

Searching scientific literature on the Web is a difficult task because of the large volume and the complex dynamics of the scientific literature and because of the complexity and narrow target of typical queries. The problem is compounded by differences among publication standards and formats used in various fields of knowledge. In this paper we review several specific solutions that apply or adapt data mining techniques to searching scientific publications

Local Academic Science Driving Organizational Change: The Adoption of Biotechnology by Japanese Firms

The local academic science base plays a dominant role in determining where and when biotechnology is adopted by existing firms or -- much more frequently -- exploited by new entrants in the U.S. In Japan this new dominant technology has almost exclusively been introduced through organizational change in existing firms. We show that for the U.S. and global pharmaceutical business -- biotechnology's most important application -- the performance enhancement associated with this organizational change is necessary for incumbent firms to remain competitive and, ultimately, to survive. Japan's sharply higher organizational change/new entry ratio compared to the U.S. during the biotech revolution is related to Japan's relatively compact geography and institutional differences between the higher-education and research funding systems, the venture capital and IPO markets, cultural characteristics and incentive systems which impact scientists' entrepreneurialism, and tort-liability exposures. Both local science base and pre-existing economic activity explained where and when Japanese firms adopted biotechnology, with the latter playing a somewhat larger role. De nova entry was determined similarly as if entry and organizational change are alternative ways of exploiting the scientific base with relative frequency reflecting underlying institutions. While similar processes are at work in Japan and America, stars in Japan induce entry or transformation of significantly fewer firms than in the U.S. and preexisting economic activity plays a greater role. We find no such significant difference for entry of keiretsu-member and nonmember firms within Japan.

Research assessment by percentile-based double rank analysis

In the double rank analysis of research publications, the local rank position of a country or institution publication is expressed as a function of the world rank position. Excluding some highly or lowly cited publications, the double rank plot fits well with a power law, which can be explained because citations for local and world publications follow lognormal distributions. We report here that the distribution of the number of country or institution publications in world percentiles is a double rank distribution that can be fitted to a power law. Only the data points in high percentiles deviate from it when the local and world $\mu$ parameters of the lognormal distributions are very different. The likelihood of publishing very highly cited papers can be calculated from the power law that can be fitted either to the upper tail of the citation distribution or to the percentile-based double rank distribution. The great advantage of the latter method is that it has universal application, because it is based on all publications and not just on highly cited publications. Furthermore, this method extends the application of the well-established percentile approach to very low percentiles where breakthroughs are reported but paper counts cannot be performed.Comment: A pdf file containing text, 9 figures and 4 tables. Accepted in Journal of Informetric

BK 10-15:

Over the years 2010-2015 TU Delft's Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment (in Dutch: Bouwkunde or BK) made good progress with its research by: merging the Architecture faculty and the Built Environment research institute; streamlining its PhD research by setting-up a graduate school for doctoral education; co-founding an institute for metropolitan solutions in Amsterdam together with MIT and Wageningen University (targeted yearly budget: 25 M€); implementing good research management; increasing the scientific output; managing a project portfolio with a yearly income of 1.5 M€ in research grants, 5 M€ in contract research and up to 2 M€ in other external funding; ranking 3rd in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2015 - Architecture / Built Environment. Presented in this book is an overview of research data and policies, together with a selection of our finest research results: activities, organisations, facilities/assets, output, including indications of their use and recognition. Now it is not the time to become complacent. Instead, we should look ahead to face new academic and societal challenges and opportunities, knowing we can always do better

Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater: The Undesirable Effects of National Research Assessment Exercises on Research

The evaluation of the quality of research at a national level has become increasingly common. The UK has been at the forefront of this trend having undertaken many assessments since 1986, the latest being the “Research Excellence Framework” in 2014. The argument of this paper is that, whatever the intended results in terms of evaluating and improving research, there have been many, presumably unintended, results that are highly undesirable for research and the university community more generally. We situate our analysis using Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction and then focus on the peculiarities of the 2008 RAE and the 2014 REF the rules of which allowed for, and indeed encouraged, significant game-playing on the part of striving universities. We conclude with practical recommendations to maintain the general intention of research assessment without the undesirable side-effects

Review of Schendel and Hofer's Book Entitled Strategic Management: A New View of Business Policy and Planning

Working Paper Serie

Publication productivity, focus on institutional, collaborative and communicational correlates: A review of literature

Review studies on academic research assessment comprising: the counting of publication output, citation counts, weighting publications, peer ratings, recognition and multiple indicators. Also describes institutional correlates of publication productivity such asfunding, library resources and electronic support. Studies on other correlates such as collaboration, information use and dissemination are a/so described