Role models in finance: Lessons from life cycle productivity of prolific scholars

Abstract

This paper examines the nature of lifecycle intellectual contributions (publication productivity and quality) of prolific scholars in finance, i.e., those that have published twelve or more scholarly papers in finance journals. Like other scholars, their productivity increases dramatically in the years before tenure and early success seems to be a useful forecast of future quality and quantity of publications. However, unlike the average finance Ph.D., these role models begin publishing earlier and they maintain a high level of productivity over long periods with productivity appearing to decline only slightly after tenure. Further, there is increasing tendency to publish with co-authors and there is high concentration of these prolific scholars especially at the five top-rated finance journals. Our findings have important implications for aspiring new finance professors. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007Scholarly publishing, Finance careers, Role models, Lotka's Power law, Academic life cycles,

Output versus salient impact in financial economics

“…'Highly right-skewed research productivity is not surprising given Lotka's Law of Scientific Productivity' (Berger and Turtle, 2006, p. 21). The Chung and Cox study was, in part, replicated by Aggarwal et al (2007), who studied the output of prolific authors in finance. While Chung and Cox (1990) estimated the Lotka-type ('c') ratio for all finance authors publishing in a large collection of finance journals in the range of 1.95 and 3.26, Aggarwal et al (2007) found it to be 2.47 for prolific authors.…”

“…The Web of Knowledge since 2005 has been expanded, and we surmise that it is as good an impact index of journal articles as any. Focusing on the prolific scholars in finance (some of whom are economists) Aggarwal et al (2007) examine the nature of lifecycle contributions -pre-and post-tenure -and envisage that early success is a useful indicator of future productivity in finance. Based on the above brief literature survey, we frame a second proposition, in the null form, as follows: P 2 : JF equivalent output of financial academics tends not to be associated with h-index.…”

“…Heck and Cooley, 1988;Chung and Cox, 1990;Heck and Cooley, 2005;Aggarwal et al, 2007), we included the impact dimension of the output. As noted earlier, we used JF % output !100 pages to focus on the top ranked of the 1000 financial academics listed by Chan et al (2002).…”

Finance editorial board membership and research productivity

“…In short, if administrators do not invest in faculty who can generate the required prerequisite levels of research, such aspirations are unattainable. Faculty and administrators must also recognize how research productivity and achievement relates to career aspirations and cycles of research achievement as noted by Aggarwal et al (2007).…”

Sixty years of research leadership: contributing authors and institutions to the journal of finance

“…Chan et al (2002) report that North American institutions dominate the finance literature, although European and Asian institutions are gaining ground. Looking at the life-cycle of prolific scholars, Aggarwal et al (2007) found that frequent, high-quality publishing early in one's career is a good predictor of future productivity. Additionally, Chan et al (2007) provide rankings of research output by country based on 21 journals.…”