CFAR Ranking Methodology
I. Methodology Overview
The Olin Business School CFAR Ranking of financial research was created to provide information about the research output of the different business schools, using the number of articles published in top journals that are relevant to the field reported by Business Source Complete and EconLit. The ranking considers articles published only by finance professors, or non-finance professors who have published at least three papers in the top three finance journals (JF, JFE and RFS).
By default, the ranking sorts universities by average yearly per capita outcome, which uses the total number of full-time faculty at each finance department each year. But it can also be sorted by total output. Currently, we document the faculty count for 128 universities, beginning in 2016. Hence the faculty count is assumed to be constant between 2000-2016, and uses the 2016 count, starting 2016, the faculty count is updated yearly. We added 13 universities in the year 2019, and have updated the faculty count for 2000-2019 in similar way, using 2019 count for 2000-2019 and updating yearly thereon.
The per capita figures for each school-year are computed as the sum of all papers published in the selected journals by the identified faculty in that school-year, divided by the number of faculty in that school-year. These per capita figures are then averaged over the time period chosen by the user to yield the final per capita output figure.
II. Methodology
Step 1: Journal Data Collection
Original data was collected from two academic journal data sources: EconLit and Business Source Complete. For each data source, we pull the article title, authors, affiliations, source, journal title, edition, and date. This procedure is repeated yearly for the entire sample.
Step 2: Faculty Data Collection
We manually gather the names of every faculty listed on the business school webpage that is denoted as Finance faculty as of August of each year, classifying them according to their position. We identify tenure track faculty. We exclude visiting professors, as well as lecturers and clinical professors. We do not count affiliated faculty as faculty.
Once the list is put together, this allows us to count the number of faculty at each department, which will be used for the per capita figures. This list also serves the purpose of qualifying the journal article as one written by a finance faculty. We only include article-author data points for which the author was a finance professor. In the case of joint departments (for example, accounting and finance), we use the whole department.
Currently, we document the faculty count for 128 universities, beginning in 2016. Hence the faculty count is assumed to be constant between 2000-2016, and uses the 2016 count; starting 2016, the faculty count is updated yearly. Similarly, we added 13 schools in 2019, and have updated the faculty count accordingly.
Step 3: Cleaning and aggregation
Once both journal and faculty data are gathered, the data is cleaned and checked for consistency. Finally, both databases are merged to match the articles to each school. This produces a list of journal articles that were published by finance faculty for a given institution (according to publication) in a given year.
Faculty who have published in top finance journals but are not affiliated with the finance department will be added to the school’s faculty count as long as they have produced at least five A-level finance publications or at least three papers in the top three finance journals (JF, JFE and RFS). They are considered finance faculty because of their influence in the field.
Impact Factors of the Journals covered:
FINANCE
ECONOMICS
ACCOUNTING
GENERAL BUSINESS
Disclaimer: We use EconLit and Business Source Complete for data on journal articles. Thus, any omission or error in the rankings table or articles is likely from the database.