Publication Records of Faculty Promoted to Professor: Evidence from the UK Accounting and Finance Academic Community

This study investigates the publication profiles of 140 accounting and finance faculty promoted to the senior rank of professor at UK and Irish universities during the period 1992 to 2007. On average, approximately 9 papers in Association of Business Schools (ABS) (2008)-listed journals, with 5 at the highest 3*/4* quality levels in a portfolio of 20 outputs are required for promotion to professor. Multivariate analysis provides evidence that publication requirements in terms of ABS ranked journal papers have increased over time, an effect attributed to the government research assessment exercise. There is no evidence that requirements differ for: internal versus external promotion, male versus female candidates; accounting versus finance professors, research intensity of institution peer group; or government research ranking of unit. There is also no evidence of a substitution effect in relation to increased recent publication history, quantity of non-ABS outputs or sole-authorship, all of which show a significant complementary effect. It is noted that there is very limited overlap in the UK and US publication journal sets, suggesting underlying geographically-based paradigm differences. The benchmarks provided in this study are informative in a range of decision settings: recruitment; those considering making an application for promotion to a chair and those involved in promotion panels; cross-disciplinary comparisons; and resource allocation. The evidence presented also contributes to the emerging policy debates concerning the aging demographic profile of accounting faculty, the management of academic labour and the Research Excellence Framework

Self-citations, co-authorships and keywords: A new approach to scientists' field mobility?

This paper introduces a new approach to detecting scientists' field mobility by focusing on an author's self-citation network, and the co-authorships and keywords in self-citing articles. Contrary to much previous literature on self-citations, we will show that author's self-citation patterns reveal important information on the development and emergence of new research topics over time. More specifically, we will discuss self-citations as a means to detect scientists' field mobility. We introduce a network based definition of field mobility, using the Optimal Percolation Method (Lambiotte & Ausloos, 2005; 2006). The results of the study can be extended to selfcitation networks of groups of authors and, generally also for other types of networks