¹University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, UK

Correspondence: J Mingers, Kent Business School, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT7 2PE, UK. E-mail: j.mingers@kent.ac.uk

Received October 2007; Accepted June 2008; Published online 24 September 2008.

Abstract

There is an increasing emphasis on the use of metrics for assessing the research contribution of academics, departments, journals or conferences. Contribution has two dimensions: quantity which can be measured by number/size of the outputs, and quality which is most easily measured by the number of citations. Recently, Hirsch proposed a new metric which is simple, combines both quality and quantity in one number, and is robust to measurement problems. This paper applies the Hirsch-index (h-index) to three groups of management academics—BAM Fellows, INFORMS Fellows and members of COPIOR—in order to evaluate the extent to which the h-index would serve as a reliable measure of the contribution of researchers in the management field.