The Development of Measures of Faculty Scholarship

Abstract

Comprehensive and valid measures for evaluating faculty scholarship are needed for two main purposes: appraising the performance of individual faculty and rating business schools and departments. This study reports a methodology for assessing faculty scholarship that, it is argued, represents an improvement over previous approaches. Three sources of scholarship information (articles, citations, and peer ratings) were obtained on each of 2,229 faculty in 32 business schools. The three measures of scholarship were significantly but not perfectly correlated, indicating that combining the three measures would yield a more comprehensive index of scholarship than any one measure alone. Scholarship measures were obtained for faculty in five areas or departments (accounting, finance, management science and statistics, management, and marketing). The effect of weighting for department size was substantial, but the effect of differentially weighting the three components of scholarship was not. The implications for faculty performance appraisal as well as department and business school appraisals are discussed.