Evaluating a Department’s Research: Testing the Leiden Methodology in Business and Management

The Leiden methodology (LM), also sometimes called the “crown indicator”, is a quantitative method for evaluating the research quality of a research group or academic department based on the citations received by the group in comparison to averages for the field. There have been a number of applications but these have mainly been in the hard sciences where the data on citations, provided by the ISI Web of Science (WoS), is more reliable. In the social sciences, including business and management, many journals and books are not included within WoS and so the LM has not been tested here. In this research study the LM has been applied on a dataset of over 3000 research publications from three UK business schools. The results show that the LM does indeed discriminate between the schools, and has a degree of concordance with other forms of evaluation, but that there are significant limitations and problems within this discipline

Testing the inverse-Compton catastrophe scenario in the intra-day variable blazar S5 0716+71. I. Simultaneous broadband observations during November 2003

Some intra-day variable, compact extra-galactic radio sources show brightness temperatures severely exceeding 10^{12} K, the limit set by catastrophic inverse-Compton (IC) cooling in sources of incoherent synchrotron radiation. The violation of the IC limit, possible under non-stationary conditions, would lead to IC avalanches in the soft-gamma-ray energy band during transient periods. For the first time, broadband signatures of possible IC catastrophes were searched for in S5 0716+71. A multifrequency observing campaign targetting S5 0716+71 was carried out in November 2003 under the framework of the European Network for the Investigation of Galactic nuclei through Multifrequency Analysis (ENIGMA) together with a campaign by the Whole Earth Blazar Telescope (WEBT), involving a pointing by the soft-gamma-ray satellite INTEGRAL, optical, near-infrared, sub-millimeter, millimeter, radio, and Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) monitoring. S5 0716+71 was very bright at radio frequencies and in a rather faint optical state during the INTEGRAL pointing; significant inter-day and low intra-day variability was recorded in the radio regime, while typical fast variability features were observed in the optical band. No correlation was found between the radio and optical emission. The source was not detected by INTEGRAL, neither by the X-ray monitor JEM-X nor by the gamma-ray imager ISGRI, but upper limits to the source emission in the 3-200 keV energy band were estimated. A brightness temperature Tb>2.1x10^{14} K was inferred from the radio variability, but no corresponding signatures of IC avalanches were recorded at higher energies. The absence of IC-catastrophe signatures provides either a lower limit delta>8 to the Doppler factor affecting the radio emission or strong constraints for modelling of the Compton catastrophes in S5 0716+71.Comment: 15 pages, 3 EPS figures, 3 tables, to appear in A&