Acknowledging Contributions to the Real Estate Literature

AbstractIn this paper, we study contributions to real estate research by individuals and institutions from 2000 to 2012. Specifically, we rank individuals by the total number of papers published in five well-known journals: Real Estate Economics, Journal of Real Estate Research, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Journal of Real Estate Portfolio Management, and Journal of Housing Research. Our findings indicate that a select number of scholars attain a notably high rank in each journal. We also identify authors that publish at least one paper in each of the five journals. We name these scholars "Grand Slam Authors." We rank institutions by the contributions of their faculty and graduates. The majority of institutions rank in the top 25 along multiple dimensions.Academics, administrators, and doctoral candidates often seek information relating to the research productivity of real estate faculty members, and the prior literature has provided a variety of different metrics to use for evaluation. Hardin, Liano, and Chan (2006) use a threshold citation approach to measure the quality of various real estate journals, researchers, and institutions. Dombrow and Turnbull (2000) study individual and institutional contributions made to the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics. Dombrow and Turnbull (2002) document individual contributions in eight different real estate journals. Gibler and Ziobrowski (2002) study authors' perceptions and preferences among a large set of real estate journals. These studies provide a benchmark for comparing individual authors, institutions, journals, and doctoral programs.Following in the steps of the prior literature, this paper identifies the research contributions of individuals, institutions, and doctoral programs from 2000 to 2012. Specifically, we examine the contribution made to Real Estate Economics (REE ), Journal of Real Estate Research (JRER), Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics (JREFE ), Journal of Real Estate Portfolio Management (JREPM ), and Journal of Housing Research (JHR). We select these journals because of their reputation, prevalence in the prior literature, and association with national real estate societies.For every paper published in these five journals, we collect the name of each author, the number of pages in each paper, the author's affiliation at the time of publication, the author's current affiliation, as well as where the author received his or her doctorate.1 This data allows us to analyze the literary contributions made to the field by individuals and institutions.We first study individual contributions to each of the journals. We rank authors based on the total number of papers published in each journal. For the premier journals (REE, JRER, and JREFE), we also present several different ranking metrics. In addition to ranking each author by the total number of papers, we rank each author by the total number of pages published in the journal. We also value weight these measures by the number of co-authors on each paper. For example, if a 20-page paper has four co-authors, then each author receives credit for 0.25 papers and five pages, respectively. We find that adjusting for the number of co-authors noticeably alters a researcher's overall ranking.We then identify the authors that publish a minimum of one paper in each of the five journals. We find 17 authors who have accomplished this, and we recognize them as "Grand Slam Authors." These individuals are Marcus T. Allen, Eli Beracha, David M. Harrison, Ken H. Johnson, William R. Miles, Norman G. Miller, Seow-Eng Ong, Joseph L.T. Ooi, Anthony Pennington-Cross, Michael J. Seiler, Vicky L. Seiler, C.F. Sirmans, Thomas M. Springer, James R. Webb, Jonathan A. Wiley, Daniel T. Winkler, and Leonard V. Zumpano.Lastly, we investigate institutional contributions to the literature along three dimensions: the productivity of the authors while at the institution (contemporaneous institution), the productivity of the authors currently at the institution (current institution), and the productivity of the institution's graduates. …