Developing Benchmarks for Evaluating Faculty Research

Benchmarking has become a popular concept within the corporate world. As accountability becomes ever more important within academe, the concept of benchmarking offers a useful perspective to academic units preparing for various types of evaluation. Benchmarks provide useful standards for comparisons that greatly enhance the validity of self-studies prepared for accreditation agencies such as the AACSB, evaluations conducted by a state Board of Regents or other legislative agency, periodic reviews conducted by a university’s central administration, or evaluations conducted by other organizations responsible for judging performance. This paper demonstrates a type of benchmarking recently made possible by technological advances. The ABI/INFORM database is used to demonstrate the development of journal publication benchmarks for marketing faculty.