An examination of the relationship between research productivity in prestigious business journals and popular press business school rankings

This paper examines the relationship between an objective measure of research productivity in prestigious business journals from 1986-1998 and recent undergraduate and masters business school ratings determined by U.S. News & World Report. These findings are validated over separate sets of U.S. News measures for undergraduate and MBA programs, extended to a smaller set of MBA rankings from Business Week, and address institutions' residuals that indicate whether ratings of the schools are under- or overestimated when research productivity is used as a predictor. The relationship between discipline research productivity and undergraduate and masters business school program rankings also are examined. Results indicate that research productivity is strongly related to undergraduate program ratings with more than 50% of the variance in ratings explained by a school's research productivity scores. Research productivity is more strongly related to undergraduate business school program ratings/rankings than to masters programs ratings/rankings.