According to Financial Times News, citations remain central to academic evaluation at leading business schools like Edhec in France, where they directly influence promotions from assistant to associate professor and beyond. The debate centers on whether citations adequately measure impact, with EDHEC’s Michael Antioco noting they signal thought leadership but vary by discipline, while ESSEC’s Ha Hoang warns against over-reliance. IESE’s Gaizka Ormazabal highlights that citations often reward fashionable topics while neglecting research with substantial real-world consequences. The discussion emerges alongside high-impact studies on biodiversity finance, political polarization, deepfake detection, and executive compensation standardization, revealing the tension between academic metrics and practical influence.
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Table of Contents
The Institutional Incentive Problem
The citation system creates what economists call a perverse incentive structure that rewards academic popularity over practical relevance. When business schools tie citations directly to career advancement and institutional rankings, they essentially create an internal market where the currency is academic attention rather than business impact. This explains why research on fashionable topics like cryptocurrency or AI ethics can generate high citation counts while foundational work on organizational behavior or supply chain management might be overlooked despite its enduring practical value. The system particularly disadvantages interdisciplinary research that bridges academic and practitioner communities, as such work often falls between disciplinary citation networks.
The Practitioner-Academic Divide
Business schools face a fundamental identity crisis: are they training grounds for future business leaders or research institutions contributing to management science? The citation metric heavily favors the latter, creating what some call the academic-practitioner relevance gap. Research that genuinely influences corporate decision-making, like the biodiversity premium study showing how environmental risks affect asset pricing, often reaches practitioners through consulting reports, executive education, or media coverage rather than academic citations. Meanwhile, the most-cited papers frequently circulate within closed academic ecosystems, creating what critics describe as an echo chamber where scholars primarily cite each other’s work without meaningful business community engagement.
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AI’s Double-Edged Sword
Emerging AI technologies present both threats and opportunities for citation-based evaluation. On one hand, AI-powered research tools could provide richer metrics beyond simple citation counts, tracking how research influences policy documents, corporate strategies, or public discourse. As ESSEC’s Hoang suggests, these tools might help scholars understand citation patterns for career development. However, AI also threatens to automate and gamify the citation system through generated literature reviews, reference padding, and even synthetic citations. The deepfake detection research highlights how technology can undermine our ability to distinguish authentic from artificial content—a challenge that could extend to academic publishing as AI becomes capable of generating plausible but meaningless research.
Beyond the Numbers Game
The solution requires structural changes to academic evaluation that acknowledge multiple forms of impact. Some progressive institutions are experimenting with portfolio-based assessment where scholars present evidence of impact across teaching, research, and engagement domains. Others are developing altmetrics that track media mentions, policy references, and industry adoption. The standardization of executive compensation research reveals how following “best practices” can undermine performance—a lesson that applies equally to academic evaluation systems. Just as boards should tailor CEO incentives to specific company circumstances, academic deans need evaluation frameworks that recognize different types of scholarly contribution rather than imposing one-size-fits-all metrics.
The Coming Reformation
We’re approaching an inflection point where the traditional citation system may undergo significant reform. The biodiversity research showing market recognition of environmental risks demonstrates how academic insights can influence financial markets long before they accumulate high citation counts. Similarly, the political polarization study’s practical applications for democracy preservation represent impact that citation metrics cannot capture. Forward-thinking business schools will likely develop hybrid evaluation systems that balance quantitative metrics with qualitative peer review, industry impact assessments, and evidence of policy or practice influence. The institutions that succeed in this transition will better serve both their academic missions and their stated purpose of developing business leaders who can address complex real-world challenges.
