Evaluating a department's research: Testing the Leiden methodology in business and management

The Leiden ranking methodology (LRM), also known as the crown indicator, is a quantitative method for evaluating the research quality of a research group or department based on the citations received by the group in comparison to averages for the field. There have been a number of applications but these have mainly been in the hard sciences where the data on citations, provided by the ISI Web of Science (WoS), is more reliable. In the social sciences, including business and management, many journals and books are not included within WoS and so the LRM has not been tested here. In this research study the LRM has been applied on a dataset of over 3,000 research publications from three British Business Schools. The results show that the LRM does indeed discriminate between the schools, and has a degree of concordance with other forms of evaluation, but that there are significant limitations and problems in this discipline. Key-words and phrases: crown indicator, research quality assessment, citations, Leiden methodology, business and management