In early November, Cabells is very pleased to be supporting the Global Business School Network (GBSN) at its annual conference in Lisbon, Portugal. In looking forward to the event, Simon Linacre looks at its theme of ‘Measuring the Impact of Business Schools’, and what this means for the development of scholarly communications.
For those of you not familiar with the Global Business School Network, they have been working with business schools, industry and charitable organizations in the developing world for many years, with the aim of enhancing access to high quality, highly relevant management education. As such, they are now a global player in developing international networking, knowledge-sharing and collaboration in wider business education communities.
Cabells will support their Annual Conference in November in its position as a leader in publishing analytics, and will host a workshop on ‘Research Impact for the Developing World’. This session will focus on the nature of management research itself – whether it should focus on global challenges rather than just business ones, and whether it can be measured effectively by traditional metrics, or if new ones can be introduced. The thinking is that unless the business school community is more pro-active about research and publishing models themselves, wider social goals will not be met and an opportunity lost to set the agenda globally.
GBSN and its members play a pivotal role here, both in seeking to take a lead on a new research agenda and also in seizing an opportunity to be at the forefront of what relevant research looks like and how it can be incentivized and rewarded. With the advent of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – a “universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity” – not only is there an increased push to change the dynamics of what prioritizes research, there comes with it a need to assess that research in different terms. This question will form the nub many of the discussions in Lisbon in November.
So, what kind of new measures could be applied? Well firstly, this does assume that measures can be applied in the first place, and there are many people who think that any kind of measurement is unhelpful and unworkable. However, academic systems are based around reward and recognition, so to a greater or lesser degree, it is difficult to see measures disappearing completely. Responsible use of such measures is key, as is the informed use of a number of data points available – this is why Cabells includes unique data such as time to publication, acceptance rates, and its own Cabells Classification Index© (CCI©) which measures journal performance using citation data within subject areas.
In a new research environment, just as important will be new measures such as Altmetrics, which Cabells also includes in its data. Altmetrics can help express the level of online engagement research publications have had, and there is a feeling that this research communications space will become much bigger and more varied as scholars and institutions alike seek new ways to disseminate research information. This is one of the most exciting areas of development in research at the moment, and it will be fascinating to see what ideas GBSN and its members can come up with at their Annual Conference.
If you would like to attend the GBSN Annual Conference, Early Bird Registration is open until the 15th September.
