Release time: 2021-07-23 20:27

Portsmouth Business School was ranked alongside Harvard and Sloan at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) based on ‘teaching power'.

The University of Portsmouth’s Business School has been named as the third most influential in the world by the Financial Times.

Portsmouth Business School was ranked alongside Harvard and Sloan at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) based on 'teaching power' — a new measure of how much their academics’ work is used on other business courses.

The ranking, compiled for the Financial Times by Open Syllabus, a US non-profit organisation, tracks the extent to which the work of academics and their business schools is assigned to students. It provides a different measure to the citations received from researchers in academic journals.

The 'teaching power' ranking has been formulated by calculating the business publications with the most references in course descriptions and reading lists since 2015.

The textbook, Organisational Behaviour in the Workplace, by retired Portsmouth academic Laurie Mullins, is the fifth most highly cited text in business, marketing, accounting and economics courses. Pearson, the publisher, says the book has been used by 500,000 students.

Another Portsmouth academic, Professor Paul Trott, Head of Strategy Enterprise & Innovation, is cited in the ranking for his textbook Innovation Management and New Product Development. He said: “For Portsmouth to be ranked so highly is a wonderful surprise. Our books have helped to develop the teaching of a wide range of subjects in each of our areas.

“The success is also attributable to 20 years at the forefront of business teaching. Each edition needs to have relevance so making sure the book is continually updated and relevant is key. Laurie Mullins’ book was first published 30 years ago - that was the first edition. It is now in its 12th edition, which was published in 2020. Similarly, my own book was first published in 1998 and is now on its seventh edition - published in 2021.

“New editions contain new updated material, updated links to the literature and new case studies. New generations of students read the new editions.”

The 'teaching power' ranking draws from five million titles cited in more than seven million syllabuses in nearly 7,400 universities in 96 countries. It is dominated by US colleges followed by those in the UK and Canada.