Evaluation of US academicians in the field of Competitive Intelligence

[christophe bisson]

Hello,

 

I come to you as i would like to know if academicians in the USA who are specialized in the field of Competitive Intelligence, are also promoted according to their number of publications into SSCI or SCI Journals? Or is there other criteria?

Since there is no Journal in the field of CI (or sub fields such as Marketing Intelligence, Technological intelligence, etc) which is SSCI or SCI (and it is impossible since the citation number is too low (it is a niche)), i wonder if the US system took into consideration this specifity?

I thank you for your attention and feedback

 

Regards

 

Christophe Bisson, Ph.D

 

[Craig S. Fleisher]

Hi Christophe:

Strangely enough, there actually isn't a "US system" used for evaluating academics. AACSB doesn't mandate one per se (although they check that each school has one and that it aligns with and reinforces the School's mission), and the AACSB-accredited business schools are typically considered the cream of the crop in the US. Most universities, and their respective business schools, apply processes that are generally unique to each institution. Having said that, there are generalities such as applying SSCI/SCI, FT's top journals list, using citation indicators, getting letters from "luminaries" in the field commenting on the academics' research outputs and results, and of course the other practices used to evaluate contributions in instruction and service.

For years now, I have provided a couple of reviews a month to promotion and tenure committees around the globe in my areas of expertise where I am supposed to assess how well someone performs against whatever standards are unique to that particular place. I have done that for several of the people in our academic community here n Ning, sometimes for tenure reasons, but more often for promotion. It is also typical that most Schools allow the candidate to suggest some evaluators, of which the committees generally pick a few, as well as the P&T committees themselves seeking out comment from well-known arms'-length reviewers who have achieved success.

As we both know, there are a limited number of outlets that regularly publish CI work, and no long-standing, respected journal attached to this field exists today. If SSCI is not picking up your work in CI because it doesn't contain many journals that publish CI research, then I would  encourage you to use Google Scholar, which has long provided citation tracking for publications of a much larger variety than SSCI/SCI of journals and related scholarly publications, including books, chapters, and proceedings, as well. Anne Harzing (harzing.com) also provides a free program you can download called "publish or perish" that will calculate an array of about 20 statistics, all using Google Scholar as the base aggregation source, which many committees over in the US (and elsewhere) have been applying to these decisions in the last 5-6 years. My last university used those statistics -- things like total # of citations, citations per year, citation per author, h and g indices of several varieties, AWCR, and e indices among others. The calculations of these are all clearly explained in the program and are fairly well-known by the universities that apply these to their decision making.

I hope that is helpful to you and wish you all the best in "putting your best foot forward" in this assessment. Please don't hesitate to reach out t me privately if I might be more helpful to you about matters that are not for public consumption. Good wishes!