The Financial Times has released their ‘Business School Research with Social Impact’ list, detailing the top 100 business school academic papers with social impact. Warwick Business School is proud to have two papers in the top 10, reaffirming the School’s commitment to conducting cutting-edge research that leads debate and makes a positive impact on society.

To compile the list, the Financial Times asked business schools worldwide to choose up to five papers, published by their academics within the last five years, that they believe have social impact. The Financial Times then used Altmetric to look at impact outside of each university, focusing on online resonance through areas such as academic citations and mentions on social media.

Model and manage the changing geopolitics of energy, co-authored by Professor Michael Bradshaw, is second overall in the list and has been mentioned by over 1,000 users on Twitter and shared by The World Economic Forum, The Conversation and Yahoo News. The paper, published in scientific journal Nature in May 2019, looks at four geopolitical scenarios for 2030 that could arise from the move to a low-carbon economy, and the key lessons that can be learnt from these scenarios to help us moving forward.

Quantifying the Impact of Scenic Environments on Health, co-authored by Professor Tobias Preis and Professor Suzy Moat, was published in Scientific Reports in November 2015 and has been covered by more than 20 news outlets from The Guardian and The Telegraph to the Houston Chronicle and Yahoo Finance. The paper explores whether the aesthetics of our environment may have quantifiable consequences for our health and wellbeing, with Professors Preis and Moat examining crowdsourced data from Scenic-Or-Not, a website where photographs from around Great Britain are rated for their ‘scenicness,’ alongside data on citizen-reported health from the Census for England and Wales.   

Nathalie Maillard, Senior Assistant Registrar (Research) at Warwick Business School said: “As a full-service University-based Business School, our research strategy aligns to the wider University’s Excellence with Purpose mission, to develop a community of world class scholars to pursue research of the highest academic quality, that generates impact with economic and social significance and benefit.

"We achieve this by providing a research environment that affords interdisciplinarity and collaboration, allowing us to focus research to address societal and economic challenges. The outcomes of this are evident in the achievements noted by the FT article and we would like to congratulate and recognise our faculty in this regard.”

The full Financial Times Business School Research with Social Impact list can be viewed here.

Full paper details:

Goldthau, A., Westphal, K., Bazilian, M. and Bradshaw, M. (2019) "Model and manage the changing geopolitics of energy", Nature, 569, 7754, 29-31

Seresinhe, C. I., Preis, T. and Moat, H. S. (2015) "Quantifying the impact of scenic environments on health", Scientific Reports, 5, 16899