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    Reverse the Curse of the Top-5
    20 Nov 2018Working Paper Summaries

    Reverse the Curse of the Top-5

    by Robert S. Kaplan
    Scholars and those who evaluate them for promotion can overweight publications ranked in a discipline’s five top journals. This paper explains the origins of journal rankings, the errors and distortions when journal rankings are used to evaluate faculty research, how they inhibit innovative research on emerging practice issues, and possible reforms to reduce their perverse incentives.
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    Author Abstract

    The past 40 years has seen a large increase in the number of articles submitted to journals ranked in the top-5 of their discipline. This increase is the rational response, by faculty, to the overweighting of publications in these journals by university promotions and tenure committees. The ranking factors for academic journals, however, arose for a completely different purpose, to guide the journal acquisition decisions by budget-constrained university librarians. Using journal impact factors to infer the quality of a faculty members’ publications incurs a high incidence of both Type 1 errors, when we conclude incorrectly that a paper published in a top-5 journal is a high-impact paper, and Type 2 errors, when we conclude that papers (and books) not published in top-5 journals have low impact. In addition, a third type of error gets introduced as faculty pursue the research they perceive is favored by editors of top-5 journals, at the potential expense of more innovative and relevant research, perceived to be unpublishable in a top-tier journal. Accounting scholarship, in particular, has underinvested in research about innovative practices or the emerging accounting issues faced by contemporary organizations (Kaplan, 2011), likely because such research is viewed as unpublishable in top-5 journals. This gap persists despite recent scholarship that has documented how important, fundamental ideas can emerge from “use-inspired” research (see Pasteur’s Quadrant (Stokes, 1997)). The paper concludes by suggesting reforms to overcome the dysfunctional fixation on publication in top-5 journals.

    Paper Information

    • Full Working Paper Text
    • Working Paper Publication Date: October 2018
    • HBS Working Paper Number: HBS Working Paper #19-052
    • Faculty Unit(s): Accounting and Management
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    Robert S. Kaplan
    Robert S. Kaplan
    Senior Fellow
    Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development, Emeritus
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