Scholars
Preparing a promotion, tenure or job-market case, or simply understanding where one's record stands and how it has developed.
What is SPAR?
SPAR, the Scholarly Performance Assessment Review, is a benchmarking platform for research in business and economics. It covers the journals of the Chartered ABS Academic Journal Guide, with the UTD24 and FT50 lists marked within it, and every researcher who has published in them.
You choose who is assessed (one scholar, one school, or the schools of a country or region) and whom they are compared with: named colleagues, the faculty of chosen schools, every school within a distance of a campus, a country or region, or a percentile band of the world. SPAR answers in plain words, charts and tables, and in a PDF you can share. Methods sets out where the data comes from and how each measure is defined.
Who is it for?
Deans and research offices
Benchmarking a school against peers, following its output over time, and supporting hiring and accreditation work with transparent figures.
Committees
Hiring, promotion and award committees that need context for a record: how it compares, and with whom.
Researchers of science
Anyone studying publication and citation patterns in business and economics across schools and countries.
What can it do for you?
Profile
One scholar or one school on every measure: output, citation impact, journal quality, recent momentum, collaboration and concentration, each placed among comparable scholars or schools worldwide.
Compare
Against the benchmark you define, with the starting point and every named peer drawn in its own colour, measure by measure and year by year.
Trace
Every figure leads back to the papers behind it: journals, tiers, co-authors and the citations each paper has received.
Report
Key takeaways in plain words, the numbers side by side, and a PDF with the same tables and charts. Set-ups can be saved and run again in one click.
Questions it answers
- How does my publication record compare with the faculty of the schools I am applying to?
- Where does a candidate stand among the scholars of a country, on output and on impact?
- How does our school's output in UTD24 or FT50 journals compare with our regional competitors?
- Is the research output of one country's top schools growing faster than another's?
- Which scholars produce most of a school's output, and in which journals?
Who created it?
SPAR was conceived and built by lifelong researchers and academics who have spent their careers in the trenches: as scholars publishing in the journals SPAR covers, and as evaluators on the hiring, promotion, tenure, award and accreditation committees that weigh research records.
They have seen how often those judgments rest on impressions, a quick read of a CV, or comparisons with the wrong peers. SPAR is the tool they wanted in those rooms and for their own careers: transparent measures, a benchmark chosen on purpose, and every number traceable to the papers behind it.