What is CHART?
The Calgary Haskayne Adaptive Research Tracker – CHART – is a transparent research benchmarking framework for Canadian business schools. It brings together data on publications, citations, research funding, policy impact, and researcher recognition to support a clearer understanding of business school research performance.
Two CHART tools
CHART has two connected tools: CHART-Index and CHART-Index Flexible (CHART-IF). Together, these tools move beyond a single ranking to support evidence-informed discussion, validation, and strategic planning.
CHART Disclaimer and Terms of Use
This dashboard provides aggregate, de‑identified institutional research benchmarking data only. By using this dashboard, you agree to the UCalgary CHART Disclaimer and Terms of Use, including adherence to the permitted and prohibited uses of the CHART and underlying data outlined therein. Continued use of the CHART‑Index constitutes acceptance of these terms.
Methodology
CHART-Index looks at multiple dimensions of research performance rather than relying on a single measure. The fixed benchmark includes indicators related to research funding, publication output, academic citation impact, policy impact, and researcher recognition.
These indicators are grouped into four broad categories:
Input: research funding
Output: publications in selected high-quality journals
Impact: academic citations and policy citations
Recognition: senior and emerging researcher honours
This structure is designed to show not only where schools rank, but also what is contributing to their performance.
The CHART analysis includes only faculty members hired into research-stream positions at each participating institution. Research-stream faculty are defined as those whose roles are primarily oriented toward scholarly research, typically reflected in a workload allocation of 40% research, 40% teaching, and 20% service, or an equivalent definition used by the institution.
Because institutional structures, role classifications, workload models, and job title conventions vary across schools, the application of this definition is determined by each participating institution based on its internal designation of research faculty. Institutions are responsible for providing faculty lists that reflect this definition. Submitted lists are reviewed against publicly available institutional websites to support completeness and consistency and to mitigate the risk of selective inclusion.
Faculty lists reflect a defined point in time. Once submitted, reviewed, and uploaded, the list remains static in the dashboard until a revised list is provided and incorporated into a subsequent data update. As a result, recent hires, departures, appointment changes, or future-dated appointments may not be reflected until the next faculty list update.
Emeritus faculty, adjunct faculty, visiting faculty, unpaid appointments, and non-research-stream appointments are excluded. Only faculty originally hired into a full-time research-stream appointment during the relevant study period are included.
For this purpose, “full-time” refers to the nature of the employment appointment, not the individual’s current workload allocation. Faculty members remain eligible for inclusion if they hold full-time research-stream appointments but have temporary or ongoing workload adjustments related to administrative leadership, program direction, service, leave arrangements, or other institutional responsibilities.
At this stage, fractional appointments are not weighted separately in the CHART faculty list. Future iterations may consider fractional appointment weighting where reliable and comparable data are available across participating institutions.
Faculty lists are used as the basis for attributing research outputs to each business school. Because faculty names may appear differently across data sources, CHART uses a structured name-disambiguation process to link included faculty members to records in funding, OpenAlex, and CRC/RSC data.
The process standardizes names across datasets by accounting for punctuation, accents, casing, name order, middle names, initials, and known name variants. It then compares records using a combination of exact matching and similarity-based matching, while limiting matches by institutional affiliation.
Potential matches are assessed based on match strength, name uniqueness, surname commonness, and whether the match creates ambiguity with another faculty member. High-confidence matches are accepted automatically. Ambiguous cases are routed to manual review, where supporting information such as titles, keywords, and institutional details is used to determine whether the record should be accepted, rejected, or left unmatched.
Only accepted matches are used to attribute publications, grants, citations, and honours to a business school. This approach is designed to reduce both false matches and missed records, while ensuring that outputs are counted only when there is sufficient evidence of both a faculty match and the relevant institutional affiliation.
Participating institutions were categorized using the Maclean’s university classification system as the reference framework. Maclean’s classifies Canadian universities into three broad categories: Primarily Undergraduate, Comprehensive, and Medical Doctoral. Primarily Undergraduate institutions are those that specialize in undergraduate education and offer relatively few graduate programs, while Comprehensive and Medical Doctoral institutions are characterized by broad PhD programming, substantial research activity, and the presence of a medical school (for Medical-Doctoral).
For the purposes of CHART-Index, the Maclean’s categories were adapted to better reflect the context of business school research benchmarking. Because the presence of a medical school is not directly relevant to business school research activity, institutions classified by Maclean’s as Medical Doctoral were combined with Comprehensive institutions into a single Comprehensive/Medical-Doctoral category.
This results in two school categories for CHART-Index reporting: Undergraduate and Comprehensive/Medical-Doctoral. This approach preserves a recognizable national classification system while avoiding distinctions that are not meaningful for the assessment of business school research performance.
Research funding is measured using data from Canada’s Tri-Agency funding bodies: SSHRC, NSERC, and CIHR.
Funding is counted when an included faculty member is listed as the Principal Investigator and their institutional affiliation matches the school at the time of the award.
CHART focuses on research grant programs and uses agency-reported award values. Records are deduplicated so that each grant is counted once.
Funding is weighted at 20%.
Publication data are collected from OpenAlex. The initial data pull is done at the university level, which means it includes publications from across the full institution.
To identify business school publications, CHART matches publication authors to the faculty list for each school. A publication is counted for a business school only when both the author name and the institutional affiliation match.
This means publications are attributed to the school where the faculty member was affiliated at the time of publication, rather than counting a faculty member’s full career publication record.
Publications are weighted at 50% total based publications in FT50 journals.
Citation data come from the OpenAlex records associated with the publications included in CHART.
CHART does not count all citations from a faculty member’s full career record. Citation measures are limited to publications that were matched to the faculty member and the relevant institution during the study period.
This approach helps ensure that citation indicators reflect the impact of research produced while faculty were affiliated with the institution being assessed.
Academic citations are weighted at 10%.
Policy impact is measured using Overton. CHART uses the DOIs from the included OpenAlex publication set to identify where those publications have been cited in policy documents, reports, guidelines, and related sources.
As with academic citations, policy citations are counted only for publications attributed to the business school through the CHART matching process.
Policy citations are weighted at 10%.
CHART includes selected national research honours as indicators of researcher recognition.
Senior recognition includes Tier 1 Canada Research Chairs and Royal Society of Canada Fellows. Emerging recognition includes Tier 2 Canada Research Chairs and Royal Society of Canada College Members. Each of these categories are weighted at 5%.
These measures are included to recognize research distinction that may not be fully captured through publications, citations, or funding alone.
Indicators are normalized so that different types of data (such as funding dollars, publication counts, citation measures, and honours) can be compared on a common scale.
Weights are then applied to each indicator, and the weighted components are added together to produce the overall CHART-Index score.
The fixed benchmark uses the same weighting structure for all schools. CHART-Index Flexible (CHART-IF) allows users to explore how results change under different weighting choices or assumptions.
FAQs
No. CHART-Index is an institutional benchmarking tool. Faculty names are used only to identify which publications, grants, citations, and honours should be attributed to each business school. Individual-level results are not the purpose of the tool and are not publicly available.
CHART-Index is the official fixed benchmark ranking. It applies the same methodology to all participating schools and produces a standardized comparison.
CHART-Index Flexible (CHART-IF) is separate from the fixed ranking. It does not change the official CHART-Index results. Instead, it allows users to explore different assumptions, such as alternative journal lists, time periods, citation measures, metric weighting choices, and research scenarios.
CHART-Index provides the shared benchmark. CHART-IF helps schools understand how performance changes under different research priorities or strategic assumptions.
CHART-IF also allows users to conduct scenario planning to understand how, given changes in key parameters (e.g., number of faculty, number of publications, dollar value of grants) the school’s ranking might change. This part of the CHART-IF is intended to support strategic planning.
CHART-IF can produce ranked results, but these should be understood as scenario results, not official CHART-Index rankings.
Because flexible results depend on user-selected settings, they should always be described as a CHART-IF scenario. When sharing or referencing flexible results, users must include the key assumptions used to generate the scenario.
CHART-IF results are scenario-based. They depend on the settings selected by the user, such as journal lists, weights, time periods, citation measures, and other assumptions.
For this reason, flexible results should not be described as official CHART-Index rankings. They should be identified as CHART-IF scenarios, with the key assumptions clearly stated.
CHART-IF is best used for research planning, internal analysis, and strategic discussion.
The dashboard includes participating Canadian business schools who have opted to share their faculty lists. Schools that are not participating are not included in the dashboard.
Absolute-count views show total institutional research activity. They are useful for understanding overall scale or volume.
Per-capita views adjust results based on research-stream faculty equivalents. They are useful for comparing schools of different sizes and for understanding research intensity relative to faculty capacity.
Yes. CHART-IF can generate an exportable scenario report. The report documents the selected settings and provides a summary of the results generated under those assumptions.
This report is intended to support interpretation, internal planning, and transparent communication of scenario-based results.
Not yet. Discipline- or field-level filtering is planned for a future version of the dashboard. The current version focuses on institutional-level benchmarking across participating Canadian business schools.
Journal quality indicators are incorporated using established journal classification lists commonly used in business school research assessment. The specific journal list and threshold applied depends on whether the analysis is conducted within the fixed CHART-Index ranking or the CHART-Index Flexible module.
For the fixed CHART-Index ranking, publication outputs are assessed using the Financial Times 50 (FT50) journal list (2026).
The CHART-Index Flexible module allows users to explore alternative journal list assumptions and publication-quality thresholds. Available journal list options include the ABDC Journal Quality List classifications (D to A*), Financial Times 50 (FT50) journal lists from both 2016 and 2026, UTD24, and SCImago quartile classifications (Q1 to Q4).
Journal list selections in the Flexible module are intended for scenario analysis and internal strategic exploration. Results generated using alternative journal lists or thresholds should therefore be interpreted as conditional on the selected parameters and should not be treated as equivalent to the fixed CHART-Index ranking.
The dashboard and exported reports will indicate the date of the data update. Users should refer to the update date when interpreting results, especially when using CHART-IF outputs in reports or presentations. The current intent is to update results bi-annually.
CHART was developed first as a Canadian business school benchmarking framework. Expansion beyond Canada is planned in the future, but it will require methodological review and some changes to the indicators.
Some CHART measures are specific to the Canadian research context, such as Tri-Agency funding, Canada Research Chairs, and Royal Society of Canada recognition. An international version would need to consider comparable indicators that are available, meaningful, and consistently measurable across countries.
Any future expansion would be developed carefully to preserve comparability, transparency, and fairness across participating institutions.
No. Faculty names are used only to help attribute publications, grants, citations, and honours to the correct business school. Individual-level reports are not provided for privacy reasons.
CHART-IF includes a What-If analysis feature that allows users to explore how changes in assumptions or scenarios may affect results.
To use the What-If analysis, select the What-If option in the relevant dashboard controls. Then enter the scenario values you want to test, such as changes to faculty capacity, publication output, or research funding. The dashboard will update to show results based on the selected scenario.
If a value is not entered into a What-If planning box, that value will be treated as zero. If the results look unexpected, check that the relevant boxes contain the values you intended to test, or switch What-If back to the default setting.
When you are finished with a What-If scenario, you must select the default option again to return to the original data-based results. The dashboard will remain in What-If mode until this is changed. Clicking the reset button will not automatically switch What-If back to default.
If the scenario is not updating, check that the What-If option has been selected in each required location and that the relevant inputs have been entered or changed.
For a step-by-step demonstration, please see the What-If tutorial video (coming soon).
Faculty lists were provided by senior leadership at each participating school and reviewed as part of the CHART data preparation process.
Faculty lists reflect a specific point in time and remain static in the dashboard until an updated list is submitted, reviewed, and uploaded. As a result, recent hires, departures, or appointment changes will not appear immediately.
If you believe your school’s faculty list is incorrect, please speak with the appropriate contact at your school. Faculty lists are updated annually by participating schools, and approved revisions will be incorporated into the dashboard as part of a future scheduled data refresh.
CHART metrics were selected to provide a transparent, comparable, and multi-dimensional view of research performance across Canadian business schools.
The framework was designed around several principles:
- Use of accessible and verifiable data sources. CHART relies on data sources that can be documented, reviewed, and consistently applied across participating schools.
- Comparability across institutions. Metrics were selected to allow schools of different sizes, structures, and disciplinary mixes to be compared using a shared framework.
- Recognition of multiple dimensions of research performance. Research performance is not captured by a single measure. CHART includes indicators related to research funding, publication output, academic citation impact, policy impact, and researcher recognition.
- Fair opportunity to compete. The fixed benchmark focuses on indicators that are broadly relevant across Canadian business schools, not dependent on reputation surveys or subjective peer assessment, and available to any school across Canada.
- Balance between volume and scale. CHART includes both absolute and per-capita views so users can examine total research activity as well as research intensity relative to faculty size.
- Transparency. The CHART methodology documents how indicators are defined, collected, normalized, weighted, and interpreted.
No ranking methodology can capture every dimension of research value. CHART-Index is intended to provide a structured benchmark and a foundation for evidence-informed discussion, while CHART-Index Flexible allows users to explore the data based on their institutional mission.
The CHART metrics were developed through an extensive consultation and review process. The fixed benchmark is designed to provide a consistent, transparent, and comparable framework across participating Canadian business schools.
That said, CHART is expected to evolve over time provided we continue to adhere to the principles noted above. Feedback on the metrics is welcome and will be considered for future iterations of the methodology.
Users who want to explore alternative assumptions can also use CHART-IF, which allows users to test different journal lists, weights, time periods, citation measures, and other settings. These flexible results are scenario-based and do not replace the official CHART-Index ranking.
Submit your feedback on the CHART methodology to chartindex@ucalgary.ca.