Why use citations to evaluate research? Eugene Garfield, the renowned American linguist who was involved in setting up the Current Contents, Science Citation Index (SCI) mentioned in 1982 that citations can be viewed as “the currency by which researchers repay the intellectual debt they owe their predecessors”[1]. Even nowadays, this statement reflects the enormous importance of citations in the academic world. Citations are, in general, a strong indicator of researchers’ influence on their peers.
According to the InCites ranking for October 2018, six professors are among the top 1% cited researchers in the “Economics and Business” field (out of about 130,000 researchers), which covers management, finance and economics, among other research areas. In fact, these researchers are some of those most frequently cited, and have ranked in 77th place ( John Antonakis , Department of Organizational Behavior), 137th place ( Guido Palazzo , Department of Strategy, Globalization and Society), 153rd place ( Rafael Lalive , Department of Economics), 602th ( Samuel Bendahan , Department of Organizational Behavior), 960th place ( Christian Zehnder, Department of Organizational Behavior) and 1008th place ( Philippe Bacchetta , Department of Economics) respectively.
Two researchers at HEC Lausanne in actuarial sciences also achieved a high ranking, in the top 1%: Enkelejd Hashorva (at the 368th position) and Hansjoerg Albrecher (at the 1525nd position) who have distinguished themselves out of about 160,000 researchers in the “Mathematics” field in Europe and Switzerland.
Lastly, Profs Marianne Schmid Mast (at the 3,113th position; top 1%), as well as Ulrich Hoffrage (at the 4,403rd position; top 5%), John Antonakis (at the 5,228th position top 5%) and Rafael Lalive (7,293rd position; top 5%) are highly ranked out of more than 300,000 researchers in the "Psychiatry & Psychology" category in Europe and Switzerland.
The InCites ranking is based on data collected over the last ten years (2008 to 2018) by the university information service Web of Science (Clarivate); thus, this data is an indicator of current impact. Moreover, this database indexes citations from the most important academic journals, which are filtered for quality. The Faculty can therefore be more than proud of its researchers, who are standing out in some of its flagship research areas!
[1] Garfield, E. (1982). The ethics of scientific publication: Authorship attribution and citation amnesia. Current Contents, 30, 622–626.
