Quality and Impact of Academic Research

This programme aims to develop a critical assessment of the quality and impact of academics, academic research, and academic journals.

The programme grew from an early critical evaluation of received wisdom in The persistent myth of high expatriate failure rates and a later paper in Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2002, which placed the myth in the wider context of how referencing errors undermine our academic credibility. The original article has generated considerable interest and many ISI and Google Scholar citations, while the 2002 JOB article is now included in many PhD courses and is rapidly gathering citations as well.

In pursuing research in this area, I have also become interested in critically assessing the impact of academic research as well as the role of editors and editorial boards in the publishing process. Recently, I have therefore started several new projects in this area.

• First, with Isabel Metz, I am looking at determinants of editorial board diversity. We have collected data for 60 journals, covering 16,000 editorial board members and nearly 10,000 articles. A first paper from this database focusing on gender diversity in editorial boards was published in the Academy of Management Learning and Education.
• Second, I have developed an interest in comparisons of research output across countries. In this context, my recent article on the publication patterns of Australian academics (High Volume, Low Impact?) has generated considerable attention.

A separate project under this programme is a large-scale assessment of citation-based impact metrics.

• The very popular Publish or Perish software is part of this project, which has also led to a number of papers that assess the quality and differences of the citation databases provided by Google Scholar and the Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge. Papers in this area have become very popular, with the article in Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics registering 25 ISI citations in less than two years after publication.
• In the same context, the usability of citation metrics such as Hirsch's h-index is evaluated and applied to various academic disciplines and journals.
• A separate article with John Mingers providing a statistical analysis of my journal ranking lists extends the service already provided to researchers through my Journal Quality List.

Several short commentaries look at measuring impact for new journals and the potential arbitrary decisions in the creation of rankings, while an article-length contribution with Nancy Adler discusses the sense and nonsense of academic rankings.

Selected publications

Online papers - Full list of publications

1. Metz, I.; Harzing, A.W.K. (2009) Gender Diversity in Editorial Boards of Management Journals, The Academy of Management Learning & Education, vol. 8, no. 4. Available online...
2. Adler, N.; Harzing, A.W.K. (2009) When Knowledge Wins: Transcending the sense and nonsense of academic rankings, The Academy of Management Learning & Education, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 72-95. Available online...
3. Harzing, A.W.K.; Wal, R. van der (2009) A Google Scholar H-Index for Journals: An Alternative Metric to Measure Journal Impact in Economics & Business?, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, vol. 60, no. 1, pp 41-46. Available online...
4. Harzing, A.W.K.; Wal, R. van der (2008) A Google Scholar H-Index for Journals: A Better Metric to Measure Journal Impact in Economics & Business?, paper presented at the 2008 Academy of Management Annual Meeting, August 8-13, 2008 - Anaheim, California. Available online...
5. Harzing, A.W.K. (2008) Arbitrary decisions in ranking studies: A commentary on Xu, Yalcinkaya, and Seggie (2008), Asia Pacific Journal of Management, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 685-689. Available online...
6. Harzing, A.W.K.; Wal, R. van der (2008) Google Scholar as a new source for citation analysis?, Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 62-71. Available online...
7. Harzing, A.W.K. (2008) On becoming a high impact journal in International Business and Management, European Journal of International Management, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 115-118. Available online...
8. Mingers, J.; Harzing, A.W.K. (2007) Ranking journals in Business and Management: A statistical analysis of the Harzing Dataset, European Journal of Information Systems, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 303-316. Available online...
9. Harzing, A.W.K; Metz, I. (2006) An analysis of the gender diversity in editorial boards: How do International Business journals compare? conference proceedings of the ANZIBA annual meeting, November 16-18, Wellington, New Zealand.
10. Metz, I.; Harzing, A.W.K. (2006) An analysis of the gender diversity in editorial boards of Management journals, paper presented at the 66th Annual meeting of the Academy of Management, Atlanta, August 11-16.
11. Harzing, A.W.K. (2005) Australian Research output in Economics & Business: High volume, low impact?, Australian Journal of Management, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 183-200. Available online...
12. Harzing, A.W.K. (2002) Are our referencing errors undermining our scholarship and credibility? The case of expatriate failure rates, Journal of Organizational Behavior, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 127-148. Available online...
13. Harzing, A.W.K. (1995) The persistent myth of high expatriate failure rates, International Journal of Human Resource Management, vol. 6, May, pp. 457-475. Available online...