PLOS ONE

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Academic business research: Impact on

academics versus impact on practice
Vivek Astvansh ID1,2,3,4*, Ethan Fridmanski5
1 Marketing Area, Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada,
2 Department of Informatics, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, Indiana University,
Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America, 3 Environmental Resilience Institute, Indiana University,
Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America, 4 Dewey Data Inc., Solana Beach, CA, United States of
America, 5 Herman B. Wells Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America

a1111111111 * [email protected]
a1111111111
a1111111111
a1111111111
a1111111111
Abstract
Business journalists and editors of academic business journals have lamented that aca-
demic research has little use for any nonacademic stakeholders, including companies, non-
profits, regulators, and governments. Although emotionally unsettling, these commentaries
OPEN ACCESS are bereft of evidence on how well a journal’s academic impact (measured by impact factor)
Citation: Astvansh V, Fridmanski E (2023) translates into practice impact. The authors provide this evidence. Specifically, they sample
Academic business research: Impact on academics 56 journals, spanning 12 business disciplines, from 2000 to 2020. For each journal-year,
versus impact on practice. PLoS ONE 18(12): they measure two- and five-year impact factor, which proxies the impact on academics.
e0289034. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.
pone.0289034
Next, for each article published in each journal-year, they collect attention score—a
weighted sum of the number of times the article is cited in 19 types of practitioner outlets—
Editor: Radoslaw Wolniak, Silesian University of
Technology, POLAND
from Altmetric. The authors then measure the correlation coefficient between the impact fac-
tor and attention score for each journal in periods of two-year and five-year. The coefficient
Received: April 25, 2023
indicates how well the journal’s academic impact has translated into practice impact. Among
Accepted: July 7, 2023 the 12 disciplines, international business discipline tops the chart, while information sys-
Published: December 6, 2023 tems, accounting, and finance occupy the bottom positions. American Economic Review
Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the leads the 56 journals, with Journal of Marketing Research and California Management
benefits of transparency in the peer review Review as close followers. The findings highlight the impact of academic business research
process; therefore, we enable the publication of —or the lack thereof.
all of the content of peer review and author
responses alongside final, published articles. The
editorial history of this article is available here:
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289034

Copyright: © 2023 Astvansh, Fridmanski. This is an

open access article distributed under the terms of Introduction
the Creative Commons Attribution License, which Umpteen journalists (e.g., [1–3]) and editors of academic journals (e.g., [4–8]) have lamented
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
that academic business research has “no obvious value to people who actually work in the
reproduction in any medium, provided the original
author and source are credited.
world of business” ([2], p. 2). This paradox is consequential to the business academy it is
expected to produce knowledge that is useful for a broad set of business stakeholders, includ-
Data Availability Statement: We use data from
ing companies, lawmakers, regulators, lawyers, nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations,
Web of Science and Altmetric.com. We are not
allowed to deposit these data to the journal but
and society. However, the irony that although so many people have commented on the acad-
users can obtain the Web of Science data from emy-practice divide, no one has quantified the divide. We address this irony in the hope that it
their university and request data from Altmetric. reignites solutions to the paradox.

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PLOS ONE Academic business research

Funding: The author(s) received no specific Specifically, we sample 56 academic journals belonging to 12 business disciplines. Next, we
funding for this work. follow a three-step procedure. First, we use the Web of Science Journal Impact Factor (IF)
Competing interests: The authors have declared database to compute two-year and five-year academic IF, which is the metric that academic
that no competing interests exist. journals use to report their impact on academics. Second, we source from Altmetric—a com-
pany that monitors the impact on academic research on nonacademics—their Altmetric
Attention score on each article published by each of these 56 academic journals from 2000 to
2020 ([9, 10]). The Altmetric Attention score measures an article’s citations in news, social
media, public policy documents, patents, blogs, etc. and thus is the most comprehensive mea-
sure of the impact of academic research on practice. We use these scores to compute for each
journal-year the two-year and five-year attention score. Third, for each article and each disci-
pline, we compute the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient between (1) the two-
year IF and two-year attention score, and (2) the five-year IF and the five-year attention score.
We hypothesize substantial variation in the correlation coefficients across the 12 disciplines.
Specifically, we expect the empirically inclined disciplines—such as accounting, finance, infor-
mation systems, and marketing—to have higher coefficients than their theoretically leaning
peers, such as general management and international business. Somewhere in between these
two extremes would lie disciplines that are a mix of theory and empirics. These disciplines
include economics, operations, and statistics.
We also expect variation across journals within a discipline. This variation would be
explained by whether a journal emphasizes managerially actionable insights or contributions
to theory. For example, the marketing discipline has four journals in the University of Texas
Dallas’ list of 24 journals. “Journal of Marketing (JM) develops and disseminates knowledge
about real-world marketing questions useful to scholars, educators, managers, policy makers,
consumers, and other societal stakeholders” ([11], p. 1). In contrast, Marketing Science is the
“premier journal focusing on empirical and theoretical quantitative research in marketing”
([12], p. 1). We thus expect JM’s correlation coefficient (between IF and attention score) to be
higher than that of Marketing Science.
The correlation coefficients report three insights. First, international business (IB) disci-
pline—via its flagship Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS)—is the most effective in
matching academic impact with practice impact. Entrepreneurship is a close second discipline.
On the other end of the spectrum are information systems (IS), accounting, and finance disci-
plines. Second, we evaluate disciplines that show the highest jump from the two-year correla-
tion coefficient to its five-year counterpart. IS ranks numero uno on this list, indicating that IS
discipline needs time to match academic impact with practice impact. Third, American Eco-
nomic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Journal of Marketing Research occupy top
slots on the correlation between two-year IF and two-year attention score. On the correlation
between the five-year values, the top three journals are the American Economic Review, Califor-
nia Management Review, and the Journal of Business Venturing. That is, American Economic
Review stands out as a top journal on both correlations.
Our article contributes by quantifying the match—or the lack thereof—between a journal’s
and a discipline’s impacts on academics and practitioners. In choosing all the journals that
Financial Times uses in its “Research Rank,” ([13]) we offer evidence on the population of
journals that business schools use to reward their faculty and news organizations use to rank
business schools. We foresee this evidence being useful to multiple stakeholders of academic
research. (1) Journal editors can use the evidence to devise ways to boost the translation of aca-
demic research into impact on practice. (2) We make a case for business school deans to con-
sider practice impact and not merely citation count (which proxies academic impact) in
promoting and tenuring faculty members. (3) Organizations that rate and rank business
schools (e.g., Financial Times, U.S. News & World Report) may consider in their evaluation

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PLOS ONE Academic business research

the practice impact of research produced a school’s faculty. (4) We enable manuscript-submit-
ting authors to rank-order journals by their odds of impacting practice and thus make an
informed choice of which journal to submit their manuscript. (5) Research-oriented applicants
to business programs may benefit from knowing the heterogeneity across disciplines and jour-
nals. (6) University and corporate libraries—which serve patrons that look up to academic
journals for cutting-edge insights—would benefit from knowing which journals they should
carry to boost the value to patrons. Perhaps, the timing is opportune as generative artificial
intelligence (AI) chatbots (e.g., OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Baidu’s Ernie) re-
emphasize the need for university faculty to create knowledge as opposed to merely dissemi-
nate knowledge that these chatbots can easily summarize.

The case for managerial relevance of academic business research

The Academy of Management Journal asked practitioners to rate the relevance of academic busi-
ness research on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high). The mean rating was a disappointing 1.11 ([14]).
What is more concerning is that respondents ranked academics as the least helpful source for
managerial problem-solving ([14]). [15] asked practitioners to evaluate academic journals and
reported a correlation of .653. Collectively, these statistics point to the glaring lack of relevance
—or should we be bold to claim “irrelevance”—of academic business research.
Because business is an applied discipline, one expects the research produced by business
academics to be managerially relevant. Managerial relevance Practical relevance is the broader
term for managerial relevance ([16]). The former considers nonmanagerial users of academic
research, such as society, politicians, regulators, nongovernmental and nonprofit organiza-
tions, journalists, lawyers, and social advocates and activists. Academics have used the follow-
ing terms as related to relevance: importance ([17]), interesting ([18]), impact, influence
([19]), usefulness ([17]), speed ([14]), the “great divide” between academics and practitioners
([20]), and translation ([7]) is “the degree to which a specific manager in an organization per-
ceives academic knowledge to aid his or her job-related thoughts or actions in the pursuit of
organizational goals” ([21], p. 212). Unfortunately, academics in almost all business disciplines
(e.g., [6, 18, 22–25] have lamented the lack of relevance of academic business research. Unfor-
tunately, the conversation has not progressed over the years, with articles published from
1970s ([26]) to 2020s (e.g., [19, 27]) reporting a lack of relevance.
[28] analyzed news and social media citations of 15,900 marketing articles published
between 2011 and 2019. The authors reported that 90% (50%) of these articles received zero
citation in news (social) media, thus quantifying the lack of relevance of academic marketing
research. Relatedly, [29] surveyed professors, associate deans, and external constituents to con-
clude that business schools assign little weight to relevance of their faculty’s research, thus sup-
pressing faculty’s incentive to engaging in relevant research. The insight is that the relevance is
compromised in the production—and not translation—stage of research ([29]).
Almost all the above commentaries are based on authors’ perceptions of lack of relevance (e.g.,
[23, 24]). Our search of the literature suggests very few articles that have used managerial surveys
to measure practice impact (e.g., [30] is a welcome exception). Further, we have found no reports
of an objective measure of the impact of journals and articles on practice. Our article fills this gap.

Data and method

Selection of journals
We consider the list of journals Financial Times (FT) uses for ranking business schools on
their research productivity (FT names this rank the FT research rank, and we call it the FT list,
for brevity) [13].

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The “first” FT list included 40 journals. In December 2010, FT included the following five
journals to its list: Contemporary Accounting Review, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal
of Management Studies, Organization Studies, and Production and Operations Management.
Thus, the list expanded from 40 to 45 journals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:
WikiProject_Academic_Journals/FT_Top_40 and https://personal.utdallas.edu/~mikepeng/
documents/CV201002_TopTierOnly_000.pdf.
On September 12, 2016, FT announced a new list of 50 journals, dropping four journals
from its earlier list of 45, and including nine new journals (i.e., 45 − 4 + 9 = 50) [13]. The
four journals that FT excluded are Academy of Management Perspectives, California Man-
agement Review, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and RAND Journal of Eco-
nomics. The nine journals that FT’s new list included are (in alphabetical order): Human
Relations, Journal of Management, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of
the Academy of Marketing Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management,
Research Policy, Review of Economic Studies, Review of Finance, and Strategic Entrepreneur-
ship Journal.
We started with the FT’s revised list of 50 journals and added to the list (1) the four journals
that FT had excluded in 2016, (2) Journal of Computing—the only journal that is not a member
of the FT list but features in the University of Texas at Dallas’ research ranking of top 100 busi-
ness schools https://web.archive.org/web/20220307053536/https://jsom.utdallas.edu/the-utd-
top-100-business-school-research-rankings/list-of-journals, and (3) three other journals: Jour-
nal of Business Research, Journal of International Marketing, and Marketing Letters. So, in all,
we considered 58 journals.
Two of these 58 journals—Academy of Management Perspectives and Sloan Management
Review—had no data in the Web of Science Journal IF database effective 2002. Therefore, we
excluded these journals. At the end of this step, our sample comprised 56 journals.
We classified the 56 journals into 12 disciplines namely, (a) accounting, (b) business ethics,
(c) economics, (d) entrepreneurship, (e) finance, (f) general management, (g) information sys-
tems, (h) international business, (i) marketing, (j) operations, (k) organizational behavior, and
(l) statistics (read Table 1).

Key measures
Our unit of analysis is journal-year. Consider journal i in year t. Our first variable are IFi,t,n,
where n is either 2 or 5, indicating journal i’s two-year IF in year t, and its five-year IF in year t.
Our second variable is Attention Scorei,t,n, where i, t, and n have the same meanings as in IFi,t,n.
We describe each of IF and attention score next.

Impact on academics: IF
Academic journals use IF to measure a journal’s impact on academics. The Web of Science cal-
culates a journal’s IF in intervals of two-year, five-year, and ten-year. Whereas the two-year IF
shows the immediate impact of research articles, the five- and ten-year IFs measure the impact
in the longer-term. Therefore, we collected from the Web of Science Journal Citation Reports
data on the two-year and five-year IFs for each journal for each year from 2000 to 2020. Alter-
natively stated, we did not compute the 10-year IF for two reasons. First, the Web of Science
does not provide data for 10-year IF (that is, it provides data for only two- and five-year IF for
each journal). Second, the Digital Object Identifier [DOI] became more commonly used effec-
tive the year 2000. Consequently, many journals would not have enough values for the 10-year
Altmetric attention scores.

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Table 1. The list of analyzed journals in 12 business disciplines.

Journal name Range of Years for Range of Years for Range of Years for Two- Range of Years for Five- Discipline
Two-Year IF Five-Year IF Year Attention Score Year Attention Score
Academy of Management Journal 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022 General management
(13)
Academy of Management 2007–2020 2007–2020 2012–2022 2012–2022
Perspectives
Academy of Management Review 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Administrative Science Quarterly 2008–2020 2008–2020 2009–2022 2009–2022
California Management Review 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Harvard Business Review 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Journal of Management 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Journal of Management Studies 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Strategic Management Journal 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Research Policy 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Organization Studies 2001–2020 2007–2020 2006–2022 2006–2022
Organization Science 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Management Science 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Journal of Finance 2002–2020 2007–2020 2003–2022 2003–2022 Finance (5)
Journal of Financial and 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Quantitative Analysis
Journal of Financial Economics 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Review of Finance
Review of Financial Studies 2010–2020 2013–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Accounting, Organizations & Society 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022 Accounting (6)
Accounting Review 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Contemporary Accounting Research 2004–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Journal of Accounting & Economics 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Journal of Accounting Research 2007–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Review of Accounting Studies 2006–2020 2008–2020 2005–2022 2005–2022
American Economic Review 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022 Economics (6)
Econometrica 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Journal of Political Economy 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Quarterly Journal of Economics 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
RAND Journal of Economics 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Review of Economic Studies 2000–2021 2006–2021 2001–2022 2001–2022
Journal of Operations Management 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022 Operations (4)
Production and Operations 2008–2020 2008–2020 2009–2022 2009–2022
Management
Operations Research 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Manufacturing & Service Operations 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Management
Journal of Applied Psychology 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022 Organizational
behavior (4)
Human Relations 2002–2020 2008–2020 2003–2022 2003–2022
Human Resource Management 2009–2020 2009–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Organizational Behavior and 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Human Decision Processes
Journal of Management Information 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022 Information systems
Systems (3)
INFORMS Journal on Computing 2001–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
(Continued )

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Table 1. (Continued)

Journal name Range of Years for Range of Years for Range of Years for Two- Range of Years for Five- Discipline
Two-Year IF Five-Year IF Year Attention Score Year Attention Score
MIS Quarterly 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Journal of the Academy of Marketing 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022 Marketing (9)
Science
Journal of Business Research 2000–2021 2006–2021 2001–2022 2001–2022
Journal of Consumer Psychology 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Journal of Consumer Research 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Journal of International Marketing 2004–2021 2008–2021 2009–2022 2009–2022
Journal of Marketing 2003–2020 2007–2020 2007–2022 2007–2022
Journal of Marketing Research 2005–2020 2007–2020 2008–2022 2008–2022
Marketing Letters 2003–2021 2007–2021 2001–2022 2005–2022
Marketing Science 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Journal of the American Statistical 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022 Statistics (1)
Association
Journal of International Business 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022 International business
Studies (1)
Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice 2005–2020 2008–2020 2009–2022 2009–2022 Entrepreneurship (3)
Journal of Business Venturing 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022
Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal 2010–2020 2010–2020 2008–2022 2008–2022
Journal of Business Ethics 2000–2020 2007–2020 2001–2022 2001–2022 Business ethics (1)
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289034.t001

Formula for IF
The formula for the n-year IF for a journal in the year t is:
times articles published by the journal in t 1 throught t n were cited in year t
IFt;n ¼
articles publishedt 1 þ . . . articles publishedt n

For example, one would use the following formula to measure the two-year IF of a journal in
the year 2022:
times articles published by the journal in 2020 and 2021 were cited in 2022
IF2022;2 ¼
articles published2020 þ articles published2021

Impact on practitioners: Attention score

We measure a journal’s impact on practitioners by Altmetric’s attention score of each article
published in the focal journal-year for which we had IF. For an article, the attention score mea-
sures the attention it received from nonacademic stakeholders until the current date, which in
our case was March 4, 2022.
The Altmetric attention score is a weighted count of the number of citations the article
received across 19 sources until the current date (read Table 2) ([9, 10]).
The score is calculated based on three main factors (Altmetric 2023). First is the volume of
attention the article receives. The score rises as more people mention the article. Altmetric
counts only one mention per source. For example, if the same Twitter account tweets about a
research article more than once, Altmetric considers the number of mentions as 1. However, if
two accounts tweet about an article, Altmetric considers the two tweets as independent men-
tions. Second, the source of attention determines how each mention is weighted. For example,
a news article contributes more to an article’s Altmetric attention score than social media posts
(such as Twitter or Reddit) ([9]). A higher weight for news sources than social media posts

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Table 2. Sources of Altmetric attention score and weight of each.

Source Weight
News 8
Blog 5
Policy document (per source) 3
Patent 3
Wikipedia 3
Peer review (Publons, Pubpeer) 1
Weibo (historical only–since 2015) 1
Google+ (historical only–since 2019) 1
F1000 1
Syllabi (Open Syllabus) 1
LinkedIn (historical only–since 2014) 0.5
Twitter (tweets and retweets) 0.25
Facebook (curated list of public Pages) 0.25
Reddit 0.25
Pinterest (historical only–since 2013) 0.25
Q&A (Stack Exchange) 0.25
YouTube 0.25
Number of Mendeley readers 0
Number of Dimensions and Web of Science citations 0
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289034.t002

asserts that the former bring more attention than the latter. Sources with a weight of zero are
not included in the Altmetric score, but are included in the summary overview page on the
Altmetric platform. Third, Altmetric determines whether the author of a mention is potentially
biased. For example, if one account is mentioning the same article multiple times, the men-
tions are weighted downward. This factor reflects the diversity of individuals discussing the
academic article. A combination of these factors produces a weighted approximation of atten-
tion a particular research article received until the current date ([9]).

Calculating two-year and five-year attention scores at the level of journal-

year
To calculate the two-year and five-year attention scores for each journal, we used the formula
for journal IF. We note one caveat, though. Altmetric only provides cumulative attention data
on a per article basis. For example, if an article’s attention score was 25 in 2019 but 30 in 2022,
users only see the current attention score. Historical data on mention sources is provided but

Fig 1. Research process. Note: The above figure lists the step-by-step process we adopted.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289034.g001

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PLOS ONE Academic business research

the proprietary attention score is not historical. Therefore, we use the total attention score on
the date (March 4, 2022) Altmetric provided us access to the data. It would be impossible to
reconstruct the attention score from scratch at each historical time point because many tweets
and other sources are not datetime stamped consistently.
For example, to calculate a two-year attention score for Econometrica in the year 2020 we
summed the total attention scores for each of the articles published in 2018 and 2019 and
divided the sum by the number of articles Econometrica published in 2018 and 2019. Fig 1
below presents the research process.

Results
We aim to measure the correlation between (1) a discipline’s impact on academics and practi-
tioners, and (2) a journal’s impact on academics and practitioners. We use the Pearson correla-
tion coefficient. For each level of observation—discipline and journal—we use two correlation
coefficients to achieve our aim. First is the correlation coefficient between a discipline’s (or a
journal’s) two-year IF and two-year attention score. For ease of exposition, we call this coeffi-
cient “two-year correlation.” We compute the “five-year correlation” similarly (read Table 3).
A low value on either of these two correlations suggests low balance between impacting aca-
demics and practitioners, whereas a high correlation indicates that the discipline/journal are
striking a high balance in impacting both sets of stakeholders: the academics and the practi-
tioners. Fig 2 visualizes the correlation coefficients.
We make three observations from Table 3 and Fig 1. First, international business (IB) leads
by having the highest correlation in both two-year and five-year duration (.86 and .93, respec-
tively, and the longest gray and black bars). Entrepreneurship is a close second. IB and entre-
preneurship outperforming other disciplines pleasantly surprised us. IS has the weakest
correlations, whereas each of accounting and finance ranks low. The weaker performance of
these three disciplines (IS, accounting, and finance) surprised us because they are highly
applied and empirically driven disciplines as compared to, say, business ethics and general
management, which are more theory-based.
Second, IS shows the steepest jump from two-year correlation to its five-year counterpart,
with values increasing from .07 to .44. Accounting also shows a sharp increase, albeit less than
IS. The insight is that these two disciplines take longer to convert academic impact into prac-
tice impact.

Table 3. Correlation coefficients between two-year (five-year) IF and two-year (five-year) attention score, by the
12 disciplines.
Discipline 2-year correlation 5-year correlation
Accounting 0.43 0.75
Business Ethics 0.68 0.83
Economics 0.55 0.56
Entrepreneurship 0.76 0.91
Finance 0.43 0.45
General Management 0.58 0.64
Information Systems 0.07 0.44
International Business 0.86 0.93
Operations 0.53 0.82
Organizational Behavior 0.62 0.79
Marketing 0.63 0.79
Statistics 0.68 0.67
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Fig 2. Correlation coefficients between two-year (five-year) IF and two-year (five-year) attention score, by the 12
disciplines. Note: The gray bar indicates the correlation coefficient between the two-year IF and the two-year attention
score. The black bar reports the coefficient between the five-year values. The insight resides in comparing the difference
between the length of the gray bar and the length of the black bar. The higher the difference, the more the time the
discipline takes to translate academic impact to practice impact.
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Third, except for statistics, no discipline sees a drop from the two-year correlation to the
five-year correlation. Even for statistics, the drop is marginal from .68 to .67.
We next repeat the two correlations, albeit for journals and not disciplines. Table 4 lists the
correlation.
Fig 3A through 3L provide the bar graphs for each of the 12 disciplines. We make four
observations from the results in Table 4 and Fig 2. First, the results show that correlations
between journal IF and Altmetric attention score are strong and positive for most journals.
Second, interesting anomalies are the negative correlations (−.56 two-year and −.78 five-
year) for Harvard Business Review as well as the weaker negative correlations for Econometrica
(−.11 two-year and −.26 five-year) and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (−.06
two-year and −.10 five-year).

Table 4. Correlation coefficients between two-year (five-year) IF and two-year (five-year) attention score, by each of 56 journals.
Journal name Discipline Two-Year Correlation Five-Year Correlation
Academy of Management Journal General management (14) 0.78 0.80
Academy of Management Perspectives 0.77 0.62
Academy of Management Review 0.72 0.81
Administrative Science Quarterly 0.61 0.82
California Management Review 0.78 0.97
Harvard Business Review -0.56 -0.78
Journal of Management 0.64 0.88
Journal of Management Studies 0.72 0.85
(Continued )

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Table 4. (Continued)

Journal name Discipline Two-Year Correlation Five-Year Correlation

Management Science 0.78 0.82
Organization Studies 0.67 0.89
Organization Science 0.38 0.26
Research Policy 0.68 0.91
Strategic Management Journal 0.53 0.52
Journal of Finance Finance (4) 0.24 0.30
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis -0.06 -0.10
Journal of Financial Economics 0.85 0.90
Review of Financial Studies 0.67 0.68
Accounting, Organizations & Society Accounting (6) 0.63 0.85
Accounting Review 0.82 0.92
Contemporary Accounting Research 0.46 0.82
Journal of Accounting & Economics -0.12 0.15
Journal of Accounting Research 0.61 0.85
Review of Accounting Studies 0.18 0.91
American Economic Review Economics (6) 0.96 0.99
Econometrica -0.11 -0.26
Journal of Political Economy 0.73 0.71
Quarterly Journal of Economics 0.95 0.95
RAND Journal of Economics 0.16 0.23
Review of Economic Studies 0.62 0.74
Journal of Operations Management Operations (4) 0.54 0.85
Operations Research 0.46 0.78
Production and Operations Management 0.39 0.83
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 0.74 0.83
Journal of Applied Psychology Organizational behavior (4) 0.85 0.87
Human Relations 0.71 0.87
Human Resource Management 0.28 0.72
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 0.61 0.71
Journal of Computing Information systems (5) 0.13 0.33
Journal of Management Information Systems 0.24 0.66
MIS Quarterly -0.15 0.34
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science Marketing (9) 0.89 0.89
Journal of Business Research 0.80 0.90
Journal of Consumer Psychology 0.46 0.81
Journal of Consumer Research 0.67 0.85
Journal of International Marketing 0.85 0.91
Journal of Marketing 0.74 0.84
Marketing Letters 0.11 0.27
Journal of Marketing Research 0.95 0.95
Marketing Science 0.17 0.68
Journal of the American Statistical Association Statistics (1) 0.68 0.67
Journal of International Business Studies International business (1) 0.86 0.93
Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice Entrepreneurship (3) 0.90 0.95
Journal of Business Venturing 0.93 0.96
Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal 0.46 0.83
Journal of Business Ethics Business ethics (1) 0.68 0.83
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Fig 3. A. Accounting Journals: Correlation Coefficients between Two-Year (Five-Year) IF and Two-Year (Five-Year) Attention Score. Note: Comparing a
journal’s two-year correlation coefficient with the five-year value indicates whether the journal needs more time to translate its academic impact to practice
impact. For example, Review of Accounting Studies has a low coefficient of two-year correlation (.18) but a high coefficient of five-year correlation (.91),
suggesting that the journal tales longer for translation. Conversely, Accounting Review does not need much time. B. Business Ethics Journal: Correlation
Coefficients between Two-Year (Five-Year) IF and Two-Year (Five-Year) Attention Score. Note: The above figure suggests that Journal of Business Ethics
requires more time to translate it academic impact to practice impact. C. Economics Journals: Correlation Coefficients between Two-Year (Five-Year) IF
and Two-Year (Five-Year) Attention Score. Note: The above figure suggests that RAND Journal of Economics lags in translating academic impact to practice
impact, whereas American Economic Review aces the translation. D. Entrepreneurship Journals: Correlation Coefficients between Two-Year (Five-Year) IF
and Two-Year (Five-Year) Attention Score. Note: Each of Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice rates very high on two-year
and five-year correlation coefficients. However, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal scores low. E. Finance Journals: Correlation Coefficients between Two-
Year (Five-Year) IF and Two-Year (Five-Year) Attention Score. Note: Journal of Finance Economics is a positive outlier among the four finance journals with
a very high two-year and five-year correlation coefficients. Journal of Finance has low coefficients, while Review of Financial Economics lies in between these
extremes. F. General Management Journals: Correlation Coefficients between Two-Year (Five-Year) IF and Two-Year (Five-Year) Attention Score. Note:
General management journals exhibit high variation in their two-year and five-year correlation coefficients. For example, Organization Science has very low
coefficients, whereas Research Policy and Organization Studies have the highest. Overall, most journals hover in the middle values of about [13]. G: IS Journals:
Correlation Coefficients between Two-Year (Five-Year) IF and Two-Year (Five-Year) Attention Score. Note: All three IS journals have weak coefficients.
Further, these journals need time to translate academic impact to practice impact. H: IB Journal: Correlation Coefficients between Two-Year (Five-Year) IF
and Two-Year (Five-Year) Attention Score. Note: JIBS has a high coefficient for both two-year and five-year periods, indicating that the journal does well to

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PLOS ONE Academic business research

timely translate its academic impact to practice impact. I: Marketing Journals: Correlation Coefficients between Two-Year (Five-Year) IF and Two-Year
(Five-Year) Attention Score. Note: Journal of Marketing Research outperforms all other marketing journals. Further, it enjoys the same coefficient for two-year
and five-year periods. Marketing Letters sits at the bottom with very weak coefficients. Lastly, Marketing Science requires more time to translate its impact. J:
Operations Journals: Correlation Coefficients between Two-Year (Five-Year) IF and Two-Year (Five-Year) Attention Score. Note: OM journals need time
to translate their impact. Further, all four journals achieve high coefficients in five-year period. K: OB Journals: Correlation Coefficients between Two-Year
(Five-Year) IF and Two-Year (Five-Year) Attention Score. Note: Human Resource Management is an outlier with very low value of two-year correlation
coefficient. All other three journals perform well on both two-year and five-year coefficients. L: Statistics Journal: Correlation Coefficients between Two-
Year (Five-Year) IF and Two-Year (Five-Year) Attention Score. Note: JASA has moderate but consistent coefficients for two-year and five-year periods.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289034.g003

Third, on average, the five-year correlations tend to be slightly higher than the two-year cor-
relations, except for the Academy of Management Practices and Journal of Political Economy.
The journal with the largest two-year and five-year differential is the Review of Accounting Stud-
ies—the difference between its two-year correlation and the five-year correlation is .73.
Fourth, the journals with the largest two-year correlations are the American Economic
Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Journal of Marketing Research—which have corre-
lations of .96, .95, and .95. The highest five-year correlations are .99, .97, and .96 for the Ameri-
can Economic Review, California Management Review, and the Journal of Business Venturing,
respectively. American Economic Review thus has the highest correlations in both categories.

Conclusion
Academics in almost all business disciplines have over the years written about the lack of rele-
vance of academic business research. These writings span general management (e.g., [31]),
international business (e.g., [4]), marketing (e.g., [5]), information systems (e.g., [6]), and
operations (e.g., [24]). Interestingly, none of these article provide quantitative evidence in sup-
port of this lack of relevance and usefulness of academic business research.
This article was motivated by this lack of evidence. We took on a massive data collection
effort by considering 56 academic business journals from 2000 to 2020 and measuring for each
journal-year the two-year IF and two-year attention score, and their five-year counterparts.
We computed the correlation coefficients between the two-year values and the five-year
values.
A priori, we expected disciplines that are more empirical than theoretical to receive higher
correlation coefficients. That is, we expected disciplines of IS, accounting, and finance to per-
form better than management and international business (IB) disciplines. However, we were
pleasantly surprised to see IB and entrepreneurship come on top. We conjecture that more
businesspeople read journals in these two disciplines than in other disciplines. We were ini-
tially surprised to see that IS, accounting, and finance disciplines as laggards. On second
thought, we speculate that the technical language these journals use cause only specialized
readers to read the research.
Our evidence offers food for thought for journal editors and business schools’ deans and
faculty in determining how they can boost the correlations between academic impact and
practice impact. Because most business schools are funded by taxpayers, we also call for evi-
dence on the various dimensions of practice impact. For example, Altmetric considers 19
sources of practice impact. We reason that citations of academic research in policy documents,
patents, and news are more impactful than citations in social media posts. Deans and journals
may consider a system where authors are rewarded disproportionately more for citations of
their articles in policy documents and patents than in social media. Such reward system will
create appropriate incentives and make business research more accountable.
We also need research that documents impediments to the lack of practice impact of academic
research. An intuitive thesis is that academic articles are overly long, technical, backward looking,

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and infused with low readability. Future research can analyze practice impact at article level and
identify correlations between an article’s attention score and its characteristics such as readability,
technicality, etc. Future research can also consider using Altmetric Attention Score data to mea-
sure the impact of exogenous shocks on a journal’s impact on practice. For example, FT has
included and excluded journals from its list in 2010 and 2016, providing exogenous shocks to the
journals that were included/excluded and their peers journals in the discipline.
In summary, we believe our article offers a useful start to highlight the gap between the aca-
demic impact and practice impact of academic business journals, while paving the path for
future research that can bridge this gap.

Author Contributions
Conceptualization: Vivek Astvansh.
Data curation: Ethan Fridmanski.
Formal analysis: Ethan Fridmanski.
Writing – original draft: Vivek Astvansh.

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