Publication Concentration Trends of Top Business Journals, 1990–2020

The Misalignment of the FT50 with the Achievement of the UN’s SDGs: A Call for Responsible Research Assessment by Business Schools

“…Other Studies [11][12][13][84][85][86], have found similar results, showing that FT50 journals were regionally focused and restricted to developed nations with strong economies, were overrepresented by select few institutions, were English language only, had maledominated first authors and editorial boards, and had a large percentage of citations coming from the same academic journals (self-referencing) [14,87].…”

“…Table 2 reports that 95% of the top 20 schools in FT50 Financial journals from 1999 to 2018 were US based and represented +56% of all publications. Another paper using ML assessed the publication trends across business disciplines from 1990 to 2020; 64,000(+) articles were published in 24 top journals found in the University of Texas at Dallas' list of 24 business journals (UTD24) [13]. The UTD24 list has 23 of its journals in common with the FT50 (see Appendix A, Table A1 astricts) spanning seven (7) disciplines (Accounting, Finance, Information Systems, Marketing Management, Operations Management and Organizational studies).…”

“…In this way, we suggest the uncritical institutionalization of the FT50 may be stifling research innovation, providing a disincentive to align research priorities with evolving societal imperatives, such as embracing corporate social responsibility and sustainability, or inter-disciplinary approaches for resolving 'wicked-world' problems identified within the SDGs. Other criticisms of the FT50 have suggested the potential existence of systemic biases within the journals themselves, such as privileging topics and organizations of interest to those in developed nations with strong economies, papers written in English, by male authors, with a large percentage of citations coming from the same journal [11][12][13][14].…”