In Spite Of <em>FT</em> 50

Between 1988 and 2003, the time taken to solve one benchmark linear programming model went down from an estimated 82 years to just one minute. This is an improvement by a factor of 43 million. Sure, computers and hardware had imp­roved in that 15-year period. But that was only by about a factor of 1,000. The transformation was really driven by the improvement in algorithms, which had improved by a factor of 43,000. Whether alg­orithms or analytical frameworks, academic research enables this kind of dramatic improvement. It generates new knowledge on what works and why, brings disruptive and transformative ideas. Frameworks such as brand equity and core competence—to take just two examples—came from academia.

What is the status on research at management institutions in India? The National Institutional Ranking Frame­work (NIRF) measures this via extensive metrics on teaching, research, consulting etc. NIRF measures research productivity by papers published and by citations. The list has 50 institutions. I carefully looked at the top 25 and the data on their papers published.

The data suggests that the institutions are publishing more research, but not in the “top 50 journals in the world”.

There are two pools of journals the NIRF uses for its data. One is the FT 50 set of publications, which includes the top 50 journals in the world as deemed by Financial Times via a survey among participating business schools. Only the pap­ers published in these journals count. The FT uses this in their global MBA ranking as well.

Looked at by this metric, the top 25 Indian institutions together published just five papers in 2012 and seven in 2014. This number is not very different from what Nirmalya Kumar found in 2011, looking at the FT50 publications over a 20-year period. On average, it was five papers a year, where the author was from an Indian management institution. So the number of papers published by Indian management academics in the FT50 publications has stayed constant for 25 years, at approximately five a year. Should we worry? Does it mean everything is bad? The answer is, in short, absolutely not.

If we look at the latest FT ratings of business schools, there is at best a weak-to-middling correlation between the overall rank and the rank on publishing in the FT50. To cite just two instances: IIM Ahmedabad is at 24 over all (out of 101). Its rank on the FT50 is 98, just about two steps above the bottom of the barrel. The Rotman School at the University of Toronto is ranked third on the FT50 research parameter. Its overall rank is 60 and is in the bottom half of the set.

The more telling pattern is that 22 out of the bottom 25 institutions on the FT50 research rank are from outside North America. And it’s exactly opposite at the other end. Except for two, all the top 25 schools on the FT50 research rank are in the US or Canada.

So what exactly does the FT50 rank really indicate? All journals have a ‘relevance’ criterion. It seems to me that—regardless of quality or rigour vis-a-vis a paper—it may well be rej­ected as it may not be contextually relevant in a US-slanted FT50 publication. That too from a factor that we cannot do anything about.

In the process we also risk missing out giving credit where it is due. The second metric in the NIRF data, Scopus, suggests that sheer output is dramatically higher, and growing. Scopus covers about 5,000 journals in the social sciences. In this wider pool, the number of publications reported by the top 25 business schools was 375 papers in 2012, and went up to 522 in 2014—an inc­rease of some 40 per cent.

We need a metric that captures quality of thinking and rigour in research. And yes, we need to look at sheer productivity too, and measures to enforce accountability and prevent slacking. So it will be a good idea to fix on Scopus, or may be some subset of journals. Or may be even invent a more contextually relevant metric that reflects and furthers the country’s objectives in cranking out both MBAs and management research.

(Narayanaswamy is a specialist in consumer behaviour and strategy and runs Myth and Math, an intellectual property and innovation lab, based in Pondicherry)