How journal rankings can suppress interdisciplinary research: A comparison between Innovation Studies and Business & Management

By Ismael Rafols, Loet Leydesdorff, Alice O'Hare, Paul Nightingale, Andrew Stirling. 2012

221 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study provides quantitative evidence on how the use of journal rankings can disadvantage interdisciplinary research in research evaluations. Using publication and citation data, it compares the degree of interdisciplinarity and the research performance of a number of Innovation Studies units with that of leading Business & Management Schools (BMS) in the UK. On the basis of various mappings and metrics, this study shows that: (i) Innovation Studies units are consistently more interdisciplinary in their research than Business & Management Schools; (ii) the top journals in the Association of Business Schools’ rankings span a less diverse set of disciplines than lower-ranked journals; (iii) this results in a more favourable assessment of the performance of Business & Management Schools, which are more disciplinary-focused. This citation-based analysis challenges the journal ranking-based assessment. In short, the investigation illustrates how ostensibly ‘excellence-based’ journal rankings exhibit a systematic bias in favour of mono-disciplinary research. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications of these phenomena, in particular how the bias is likely to affect negatively the evaluation and associated financial resourcing of interdisciplinary research organisations, and may result in researchers becoming more compliant with disciplinary authority over time.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d318b4e06ea3eca5d1473927e742b8f9d9d8186c

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Citations in the corpus

A review of theory and practice in scientometrics (2015, background): “There is currently little research in this area (Larivière & Gingras, 2010) although Rafols et al. (2012) found a systematic bias in research evaluation against interdisciplinary research in the field of business and management.”
Understanding barriers to decision making in the UK energy-food-water nexus: The added value of interdisciplinary approaches (2016, background): “…(iii) the role of top journals and editors, who may lack appropriate metrics to assess the quality of papers based on a transdisciplinary research approaches (see Rafols et al., 2012); and (iv) the delay in public and private funding to research on the nexus (such as the EU Horizon programs).”
The Impact of Changing Funding and Authority Relationships on Scientific Innovations (2018, background): “…are affecting epistemic pluralism, such toleration of intellectual diversity is clearly declining in some countries (see also Lee 2009 on heterodox economics and Rafols et al. 2012 on a potential mechanism for reducing intellectual diversity built into the British research evaluation system).”
Global maps of science based on the new Web-of-Science categories (2012, unknown): “An additional routine enables the user to measure Rao-Stirling diversity as an index of the interdisciplinarity in the samples under study (cf. Carley and Porter 2012; Leydesdorff and Rafols 2011; Porter and Rafols 2009; Rafols et al. 2012; Stirling 2007).”