Harry Müller

A Citation Based Ranking of German-Speaking Researchers in Business Administration with Data of Google Scholar

Abstract Rankings of academics can be constructed in two different ways, either based on journal rankings or based on citations. Although citation-based rankings promise some fundamental advantages they are still not common in German-speaking business administration. However, the choice of the underlying database is crucial. This article argues that for German-speaking researchers in business administration (as an example for a non-English speaking scientific community in the social sciences) Google Scholar is an appropriate database. Unfortunately, it contains some structural errors that require diligent corrections. With that in mind, all 1572 members of the German Academic Association for Business Research (VHB) are ranked according to the citations of their recent publications (2005–2009). The results are compared to those of the Handelsblatt-BWL-Ranking which is the most prominent journal-based ranking of German-speaking academics in this discipline. It becomes clear that differences in method lead to different results.

Scholars' physical appearance, research performance, and feelings of happiness

Our study aims to analyse whether former feelings of happiness and/or physical appearance are significantly correlated with the subsequent observable research performance of scholars. To the best of our knowledge, both has not been analysed previously. To do so, we photographed 49 persons attending the 72nd annual conference of the German Academic Association for Business Research (VHB), which took place in Bremen in 2010. We interviewed them about their feelings of happiness. Later we asked students to evaluate the photographed persons’ attractiveness, competence, trustworthiness, likeability and their feelings of happiness. To determine the academics’ research performance we compiled a list of their recent journal publications, considering different journal weights and dividing them by the number of authors. Regression analyses reveal significant relationships between feelings of happiness in 2010 and research performance in 2011/2012. Conversely, we cannot observe significant relationships between previous research performance and subsequently reported feelings of happiness. Even though at first glance one would not expect that physical appearance is relevant for research output we find significant relationships. While previous studies show that scholars’ evaluations of teaching are influenced by attractiveness, our results suggest that research performance is not influenced by attractiveness but especially by (perceived) trustworthiness. Our data also reveal a weakly significant correlation between scholars’ perceived feelings of happiness and their reported feelings of happiness.

Outputanalyse betriebswirtschaftlicher Fachbereiche – Ein zitationsbasiertes Ranking deutschsprachiger Hochschulen

Hochschulen erbringen komplexe Dienstleistungen in Forschung und Lehre, deren Messbarkeit grundsatzlich schwierig ist. Aus informationsokonomischer Sicht sind komplexe Dienstleistungen durch vielfaltige Formen von Qualitats- und Verhaltensunsicherheiten gepragt (vgl. Roth 2001, S. 46). Gerade aus diesem Umstand erwachst die Forderung nach Rankings als Informationsinstrument. Sie versuchen, einerseits Informationen verfugbar zu machen und andererseits durch die Rangfolgenbildung deren Komplexitat zu reduzieren. Die Methodologie dieser Komplexitatsreduktion wiederum bestimmt die Validitat der Ergebnisse und sollte daher mit Umsicht gewahlt und stets kritisch hinterfragt werden.