Ranking: Which Schools Are Best For Management Research?

When it comes to the sheer volume of publications in top management journals, no other business school outpaced University of Pennsylvania’s The Wharton School in 2023.

Wharton faculty published 21 articles in management’s eight most prestigious schools, according to the TAMUGA Rankings, an annual index of research output compiled by Texas A&M University and the University of Georgia.

It shouldn’t be a big surprise. After Wharton’s fall from the The Financial Times’ Global MBA ranking in 2023, it was also bumped from the FT’s research ranking. But The B-school, widely regarded as one of the best in the world, returned to the top of both ranks this year.

It’s also the largest business school in terms of faculty in the TAMUGA Ranking, tying with Harvard Business School at 46 tenure-track management faculty. That’s a leg up in a ranking that counts articles published.

One big caveat: If you look at the number of top-tier publications per faculty member, Wharton falls all the way to No. 19 with an average of 0.46 articles per management scholar.

HOW TAMUGA COUNTS ARTICLES

For its annual list, the TAMUGA Rankings count only publications in management’s eight top-tier journals: Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Applied Psychology, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Personnel Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Counted articles must be published by management faculty within the calendar year – in this case January to December 2023. Articles with co-authors from multiple universities are counted once for each school, but articles with co-authors from the same institution are just counted once. So, an article co-authored by two University of Florida professors, one Texas A&M University professor, and one University of Georgia professor would count as “one” for Florida, “one” for Texas A&M, and “one” for Georgia, according to the ranking’s methodology page.

The full TAMUGA Ranking includes publication totals for United States Schools for each year from 2019 to 2023 as well as a five-year aggregate.

Wharton also tops the five-year aggregate with 85 total publications, but falls to 23rd on publications per faculty at a rate of 1.89 per faculty member.

University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business ranks second in number of management articles published in the five-year period at 70, as well as second in articles per faculty at 5.09. It is followed by University of Florida and Texas A&M University with 68 articles each, and Arizona State University with 66.

WHARTON ALSO TOPS UT-DALLAS RANKING

Wharton also tops the UT-Dallas Top 100 Business School Research Rankings for 2024 with 392 articles published. Both that ranking and the Financial Times’ research ranking consider more academic journals across more disciplines, but the TAMUGA Ranking counts only management faculty and just for one calendar year.

The FT ranking weighs the number of publications by a school’s current faculty in 50 academic and practitioner journals over a 30-month span while UT-Dallas’ looks instead at a school’s number of publications in 24 journals in a five-year span. Apples to apples comparisons, then, are not easy. However, Wharton, with its more than 20 research centers and initiatives, manages to top all three.

It has topped the TAMUGA Ranking for the last three years, rising from a three-way tie for seventh in 2019 with 12 published management articles (0.27 per scholar), to a three-way tie for third in 2020 (13 articles or 0.28 per scholar. In 2021, it tied for first with Texas A&M with 19 articles. However, in all those years, it has only broken the top 20 in the article per faculty metric.

You can see the top 10 finishers for both 2023 and 2022 in the chart below. Or click through the following pages to see the top 50 universities in management research over the last five years, in 2023, and in 2022.

You can see the full TAMUGA ranking here.

PAGE 2: TAMUGA Ranking five year aggregate for U.S. Schools

PAGE 3: TAMUGA Ranking 2023

PAGE 4: TAMUGA Ranking 2022