Chicago Booth top school for research with most impact on management

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Chicago’s Booth School of Business rates highest among its peers around the world for producing research that has the most impact on management, according to an assessment by the Financial Times.

The school ranks ahead of Stanford, Columbia, MIT and Harvard, cementing the leading US business schools as producers of the best research that combines rigour with resonance beyond academia and relevance to societal goals.

Insead, based in France and Singapore, and the London Business School in the UK, are the top schools outside the US, coming just below other leading institutions including Northwestern, Wharton, Haas and New York University.

The FT evaluation seeks to examine recent high quality research by criteria that go beyond the standard benchmark for academic success of publication in leading journals, by weighting faculties’ output on a range of additional criteria.

It reflects growing calls by students, academics and external organisations for greater accountability and ways for universities to encourage work that has a broader impact on society, such as the UK’s research evaluation framework.

Such evaluations seek to reduce the narrow focus on academic publications as such a dominant criteria in hiring and promotion of faculty, in favour of crediting teaching excellence and efforts to influence policy and practice. 

Madhav Rajan, Booth’s dean, said of the ranking: “I’m really thrilled. A lot of universities just look at the number of publications. That’s crazy: it’s a system you can game. We actually read the papers. We want impact, to know it’s work we want to support.”

Andrew Hoffman, professor of sustainable enterprise at Michigan’s Ross School of Business and author of The Engaged Scholar, said: “We ask questions that are theoretically driven and of little to no interest to business people, using a language most business people don’t understand and publishing in journals they don’t read. Academic publishing for the ivory tower will remain the focus for a long time.”

The ranking comes amid an expansion of open data and the development of new metrics by organisations with which the FT partnered, including OpenAlex, Open Syllabus, Overton and Scite, as well as the Case Centre, Clarivate and SSRN.

To examine academic rigour, the ranking takes into account research published in the FT50 list of top peer reviewed journals identified by business schools themselves, but then further judges them based on citations of the individual articles in other subsequent academic work, after adjusting by discipline and by whether the references are positive.

It then considers the resonance of the research beyond academia by examining the papers that were cited in government policy documents, consultation reports and by think-tanks, and downloads of papers by readers in governments, companies and other external organisations.

To assess teaching — an area in which many argue academics have the greatest potential impact via their students — it examines books and articles assigned at other universities on courses and reading lists, and considers which business school authors produced the most demanded teaching case studies.

It seeks to identify which academic papers address pressing societal needs by analysing the alignment of content with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

A final weighting seeks to adjust academic publications by faculty size, given the historical strength and larger resources at US universities through fees, donations and other sources of funding.