The Wharton Marketing Department: Stature and External Perceptions

The table and notes below describe marketing department rankings pertaining to the 1980s or 1990s. For cases in which a single rating organization prepares periodic rankings based on the same criteria only the most recent evaluation has been reported.

The rankings cover peer-based evaluation, publication productivity, citations, and popular-press evaluations (themselves typically some combination of peer-evaluation, student evaluation and corporate-recruiter evaluation). Note that the popular press evaluations fromBusiness Week at the department level are explicitly an attempt to evaluate a school’s being a successful source for student-graduates to hire by those organizations surveyed, rather than an evaluation of the department’s faculty. In recent years organizations hiring for typical “marketing” jobs have been frustrated at many of the top schools in their inability to attract high-quality students to their opportunities.

The peer evaluations are from the University of Maryland 1989 study, which were reported both for departments as a whole (column B) and on a per-faculty-member basis (column A). Editorial board memberships are another form of peer evaluation, listed in column C (data from February 2006).

The publication counts in columns D, E, F and G cover various combinations of journals and time periods. The citation count in column H is outdated (1972-84) but no more recent such analysis appears to exist.

Rankings of Marketing Departments

 

Peer
Evaluation
Publications Citations Popular
Press
A B C D E F G H I J
Wharton 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 2 1 4
Northwestern 2 2 12 3 7 5 3 1 1
Cornell 3 15 17 27 25 49 28 9
MIT 4 17 >20 24 40 46 14
Duke 5 8 2 15 23 10 20 6 5
Dartmouth 6 20 12 38 29 >50 26
Pittsburgh 7 22 12 20 35 21 12
Michigan 8 8 8 4 11 20 21 5 2 3
UCLA 9 13 12 9 10 8 23 7 10
Columbia 10 4 3 2 18 7 7 8 8
Stanford 11 12 17 11 16 23 5 4 7
Harvard 19 5 >20 27 30 43 2 3 2
Chicago 22 18 17 8 5 >50 19 9 6
Berkeley 9 25 24 32 11 9 5
Minnesota 13 10 >20 13 9 13 25
Florida 5 5 2 12 >30
Texas 18 11 >20 5 4 3 9 4
NYU 16 6 6 7 14 1 4
Indiana 20 9 >20 19 13 9 10 3

 

Rankings of Marketing Departments: Table Entries and Sources

A. Peer evaluation by 92 top marketing faculty nationwide; evaluation corrected for size of the department. (University of Maryland study). 1989. Shelley Kirkpatric and Edwin Locke, “Assessment of Faculty Scholarship in 32 Leading Business Schools,” University of Maryland working paper.

B. Peer evaluation by 92 top marketing faculty nationwide; “overall” evaluation not corrected for department size. University of Maryland study. 1989.

C. Number of editorial board memberships in the top 4 marketing journals: Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science. As of February 2006. Count by D. Schmittlein.

D. Number of articles published in Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, 1987-1996. Deborah F. Spake and Susan K. Harmon, “Institutional and Individual Research Productivity: A Comparison of Alternative Approaches, ” working paper, University of Alabama, 1998.

E. Number of articles published in Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, 1989-1993. (Count of authors.) Christine Page and Jakki Mohr, “Individual and Institutional Productivity in Marketing: Publishing in the Top Three Marketing Journals, AMA Winter Educators’ Proceedings 1995.

F. Number of articles published in Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Retailing. 1985-1989. Joseph Cote, An Institutional Analysis,” Association for Consumer Research Newsletter, December 1990.

G. Number of total citations, SSCI, 1972-1984. Victor Cook, Jr. “To Cite or Not To Cite: Measuring the Research Productivity of Marketing Faculties,” AMA Educator’s Conference Proceedings 1986.

H. Ranking of graduate school departments, US News & World Report, March 29, 1999.

I. Ranking of undergraduate school departments (list of top 5 only), US News & World Report,September 1996.

J. Ranking of MBA departments by corporate recruiters, based on “Where do you find the best graduates?” (list of top 10 only), Business Week, October 19, 1998.

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