Top-50 academics in Business & Management worldwide: new 2023 ranking

Analysis of the top-50 most highly cited academics in Business & Management and its increasing level of diversity over the years

Anne-Wil Harzing - Mon 19 Feb 2024 07:09 (updated Mon 19 Feb 2024 08:32)

I have written up blogposts on the 2020, 2021, and 2022 version of the Scopus top 2% most cited academics, but decided to turn the 2023 write-up into a white paper to make it easier to access. So please refer to Highly cited academics in Business & Management over the years for the full story of how I created the top-50 for 2023. However, below I have reproduced what I think is the most interesting part of the analysis: the increasing gender and international diversity in the top of the ranking.

The proportion of female scholars in the top-25 has grown from 4% and 8% in the early days, to 28% the last two periods. I do not have current data for the proportion of senior female academics – those most likely to be ranked as highly-cited academics – in Business & Management. However, I suspect it is not much above 30%, and much lower in some countries. Hence, for the last two "generations", the gender distribution in the top-25 might well be representative of the wider population of academics.

The level of international diversity has increased even more significantly. Whereas for the oldest group of scholars only 16% came from outside North America, this increased to 32% in the second group, 36% in the third group, and 64% in the youngest group of scholars. North American scholars are clearly in a minority among the most cited young academics.

Moreover, whereas for the three oldest group of scholars many of the non-North American scholars came from other English-speaking countries, in the youngest group of scholars we find a very wide variety of countries included. Granted, English-speaking countries are still well represented. Although the UK features only once (with a Finnish scholar), Australia has three scholars on the list.

However, a much wider variety of countries is now included. Germany has four scholars on the list, the Netherlands and Italy are represented with two scholars each. The remaining scholars in the 2000-2010 top-25 come from an eclectic mix of non-English speaking countries: Finland, Hong Kong, Japan and Brazil. The world of Business & Management has become truly international!

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