Creating a Business Analytics Department Research Ranking

Which academic business analytics (BA) departments produce the most research?

This is a deceptively simple question that many in our field are interested in – from prospective students to academic administrators and industry partners. But finding a rigorous, reliable answer is not easy.  Existing rankings are of little help. Reputation-based program rankings such as the U.S. News & World Report are notoriously subjective. For example, before the 2010s, many institutions in the U.S. News business analytics rankings did not even offer a BA degree! Meanwhile, research-specific rankings based on existing lists of publication outlets, such as the University of Texas at Dallas (UT-Dallas) and Financial Times (FT), focus more on traditional business disciplines including management information systems and supply chain management.  

At the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business, we decided to design a ranking that is based on data and would answer our question by acknowledging that BA programs encompass a wide swath of academic fields. We unveiled our ranking and the methodology behind it at the 2025 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta last October. 

As an emerging, multidisciplinary academic field, BA even being defined as a discipline – or what counts as a BA department or BA publication – is nontrivial. We fortunately had lots of experience grappling with these issues over the past decade. 

In our design of BA academic programs [1], for which we won the 2021 UPS George D. Smith Prize, we adopted a methods-centered approach that combines computing, data science and applied mathematics (optimization and statistics) with domain-specific work in operations management. We also created our own evidence-based list of A-level publication outlets [2], primarily for use by our students and early-career faculty to focus their work in the most impactful directions. This list incorporates the top outlets from data science (e.g., KDD and NeurIPS), optimization (e.g., SIAM Journal on Optimization) and statistics (e.g., Journal of the American Statistical Association), along with leading traditional business outlets. The result was a comprehensive set of publication targets for the BA field. This brings us back to the question of which BA departments produce the most and best research. We realized that our list of A-level outlets would provide solid ground for a comprehensive ranking of BA departments. However, multiple practical problems remained. 

Given the multidisciplinary nature of the A-list, and the fact that publication metadata often does not include departmental affiliations, we realized that we can’t simply search each outlet for authors from a particular university. This would result in publication counts that measured, or even emphasized, the quality of the respective computer science, statistics or mathematics departments at those universities, which is very much not the goal. Instead, we want to focus on BA departments housed in business schools. 

So, our data collection would have to proceed from the department level rather than the outlet or university level. Which reveals the second problem: What even counts as a BA department? Every business school divides the academic landscape in its own way, based on everything from collegiate priorities to historical legacies. Particularly in a relatively young and multidisciplinary field such as BA, there is an enormous range of department names and faculty compositions.

We overcame these barriers with four primary steps: 

1. Identify the right departments. We started with a collection of about 110 universities, gathered from various sources: U.S. News rankings, UT-Dallas and FT50 rankings, Association of American Universities membership, etc. (Note that this set of universities is intended to serve as a seed set. If we missed your school and you would like to be included, please just let us know!) Within the college or school of business at each seed university, we identified the department having the best alignment with our definition of the field.  
2. Collect faculty names. Within each of the identified departments, we manually scanned departmental/collegiate websites to collect the faculty roster. We chose to include only tenured and tenure-track faculty in this step, which has its own set of design choices and limitations – e.g., research active instructional track or emeritus faculty were excluded, as were Ph.D. students, but faculty with primary administrative appointments were included if their name appeared on the faculty roster. This collection was done in the middle of the fall semester so that all departments had enough time to update their web rosters for the latest academic year. 
3. Gather publication data. For each faculty member, we queried the Scopus publication database. Scopus was chosen because of its relatively complete indexing of both journal and conference publications (cf Web of Science) and because of the ease of direct queries (cf Google Scholar). We chose a five-year window of publication data, corresponding to the period used by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). We note here another limitation: similar to AACSB academic productivity reporting, we are gathering data on each department’s current faculty. Counts can therefore be dramatically affected by recent hirings, departures and retirements.
4. Collate results. Finally, departmental totals for both total publications and A-list publications were aggregated. In addition to total publications of both types, we computed per-faculty-member averages.

Our initial set of rankings was circulated internally and sent to a few academic colleagues around the country for feedback. Then, the first official rankings reflecting the time period 2020-2024 went live just in time for the 2025 INFORMS Annual Meeting in late October. Faculty rosters were gathered in fall 2025. The ranking can be found at https://tippie.uiowa.edu/faculty-research/research-expertise-interests/business-analytics-research-rankings and can be sorted in multiple ways, although we suggest that A-list papers per faculty member is the most informative. 

Much of the top end of our rankings confirm conventional wisdom. It’s no surprise to see traditional powerhouse departments such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Arizona and University of Florida near the top, but one might not have expected to see the University of California, Los Angeles or Temple University quite so high on the list. As a shameless plug, Iowa comes in tied with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at No. 15, one step below New York University.  We are already working on the next iteration of rankings and are expecting significant improvements. Basic data collection errors – Did we miss a university? Include the wrong department? Fail to identify the right faculty? – will be corrected, and we ask the community to send those corrections directly to [email protected].  

We will improve other aspects, too. The current ranking is limited to U.S. schools; the decision of whether to cast a geographically wider net is under consideration. The web-based publication does not currently offer filtering to change the list of journals to fit individual needs. Finally, the next release will incorporate citation information to quantify academic impact as well as productivity.  We hope this tool proves a useful step forward, clarifying the definition of this multidisciplinary field and providing comparative evaluation for academics, administrators and prospective students. We look forward to your feedback. 

References

1. A. M. Campbell and N. Street, 2021, “The evolution of analytics education at Tippie,” OR/MS Today, August 5, https://doi.org/10.1287/orms.2021.04.12.
2. B. W. Thomas and A. M. Campbell, 2022, “Creating a business analytics publication list,” OR/MS Today, February 4, https://doi.org/10.1287/orms.2022.01.11.