Sunday 17 July 2016

Top ten most cited research papers in Business, Economics and Management

Google was founded on a technology that ranks web pages according to how highly they are cited (i.e. how often they are linked to). The company now provides a service to gauge the visibility and influence of academic journals using a similar citation ranking.
The 2016 Google Scholar Metrics are out. These cover research articles published in 2011–2015 and include citations for these articles as indexed by Google Scholar as of June 2016. A citation is when one research article refers to (cites) a previously published article and is an approximate indicator of an article's impact.

For articles to be included they need to be available via a journal publisher, a university repository, selected conferences that publish papers online, and established preprint repositories such as arXiv, SSRN, NBER and RePEC. Google Scholar Metrics include articles across the range of academic disciplines (e.g., arts, business, education, law, dentistry, medicine, music, social science, and the life, engineering and physical sciences) and published in different languages. For each language covered a ranking of the top 100 journals by the highest h-index is provided.

Google Scholar and Scholar Metrics do not make money for Google. These are services for the research community. Google Scholar makes it easier to find research articles and see their impact in terms of citations. Scholar Metrics presents the citation count for each journal publication and an h5-index for the journal (rather than the author). An h5-index of 20 means that during the previous five years the journal published 20 papers that were cited 20 times or more. The publication in Business, Economics and Management with the highest h5-index in the 2016 Scholar Metrics is NBER Working Papers with an h5-index of 165 (165 papers in the last five years have been cited 165 times or more).

Like many researchers, I keep and maintain a Google Scholar account, and I like to see the extent to which my work is cited, where it was cited and how. This year I took a closer look at the Scholar Metrics in the areas of Business, Economics and Management, because I have a highly cited paper on social media with some wonderful colleagues. We produced a framework, the Social Media Honeycomb, which explains how people engage with and use social media in different ways. This framework has been used by many different organizations (businesses, universities, unions, and heath care associations) to design and develop social media practices. The paper has become the top ranked paper in the journal Business Horizons with 1,741 cites in the last five years, and using these Scholar Metrics and as shown in the table below, it is the most highly cited paper in the last five years across all business, economic and management journals.

While Google Scholar and Scholar Metrics are imperfect (just like most research studies), I find them interesting and useful for identifying and reading ‘hot’ research papers. And if I am lucky enough to have a paper that ranks well, then I will gladly share this news.




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