Ask the Business School Ranking Media to Walk Their Talk: Rejoinder to 'Identifying Research Topic Development in Business and Management Education Research Using Legitimation Code Theory'

摘要

Arbaugh, Fornaciari, and Hwang (2016) are to be commended for undertaking two worthy tasks: demonstrating the value of citation counts in the business and management education (BME) field and attracting new scholars to the field by drawing on rigorous citation analyses. In this commentary, I first address the use of citation counts in BME research and then conclude with my own idea for attracting more scholars to the field. Citations have always been of interest to institutions in evaluating their research faculty. In previous years, anyone wishing to see the citation counts for scholarly papers had to trek to their campus library's reference section and look them up in already out-of-date tomes. Now that citations are kept in easily accessed online databases, citation counts increasingly are used by more universities to evaluate their faculty. Despite their limitations, citation counts seem to loom ever larger in importance. Yet we all know the limitations of citation counts, all of which are magnified in BME research: citation counts only assess a narrow kind of scholarly impact (whether other published articles cited the work) and do not assess the impact BME research might have in the classroom (instructional innovations) or in curriculum reform and design.