Frederik Anseel (@fanseel) was pretty sure that I would like this research. He was right.

The impact a researcher has on the academic field is important, as it is linked  to the allocation of resources and rewards for both individuals and departments. If we examine how this is measured, well,…”scholarly impact is consistently and uniformly assessed by counting the number of times a particular article, articles in a particular journal, an individual’s entire body of work, the body of work of the faculty in a department or university, or the body of work produced by an entire field of study has been cited in scholarly publications.”

But is this real impact? Or rather, is this impact on the real world? Therefor this alternative measurement, and what do the researchers conclude? “Our results indicate that impact inside the Academy cannot be equated with impact outside the Academy. Moreover, number of citations is unrelated to number of non-.edu Web pages (after controlling for number of years since receiving a doctor- ate and number of publications).”

And so: “our results point to the possibility of creating a portfolio model of performance management systems in which the assessment and reward of performance is based on impact both inside and outside of the Academy.”

Abstract of the research (that can be downloaded here for free):

Scholarly impact is one of the strongest currencies in the Academy and has traditionally been equated with number of citations— be it for individuals, articles, departments, universities, journals, or entire fields. Adopting an alternative definition and measure, we use number of pages as indexed by Google to assess scholarly impact on stakeholders outside the Academy. Based on a sample including 384 of the 550 most highly cited management scholars in the past three decades, results show that scholarly impact is amultidimensional construct and that the impact of scholarly research on internal stakeholders (i.e., other members of the Academy) cannot be equated with impact on external stakeholders (i.e., those outside the Academy). We illustrate these results with tables showing important changes in the rank ordering of individuals based on whether we operationalize impact considering internal stakeholders (i.e., number of citations) or external stakeholders (i.e., number of non-.edu Web pages). Also, we provide tables listing the most influential scholars inside the Academy who also have an important impact outside the Academy. We discuss implications for empirical research, theory development, and practice regarding the meaning and measurement of scholarly impact.