Appalachian State University Citation Analysis in the Business Disciplines

Recently a colleague in the management department who was going up for promotion to full professor asked for my assistance in conducting a citation analysis for his publications. It is common for universities to evaluate the impact of a scholar/author’s research during hiring, promotion, and tenure and merit pay decisions. The idea is that the more a researcher’s work is accessed, read and used, the more the research has contributed to the field. Citation analysis is an increasingly common way to evaluate research impact and is considered to be more appropriate and objective than other metrics such as journal impact factors or rankings. The primary reason that citation analysis is preferred is that it looks at the article or publication itself and not the container in which it is published. (There is a substantial body of research criticizing the use of the Impact Factor). I began by searching for the faculty member’s publications in the ISI-Web of Science database. For decades the ISI (Institute for Scientific Information), now Thomson Scientific, citation databases have been used as a starting point and often as the only tool for locating citations and conducting citation analyses, primarily because they were the only general and comprehensive citation databases in existence. The Science Citation Index system wa