A Simple Journal Ranking Tactic to Address Coercive Citation and Discipline-Specific Citation Density in Academic Business Journals
8 Pages Posted: 4 Feb 2013
Date Written: February 4, 2013
Abstract
This paper describes a flexible way to unify the many disparate citation-based journal ranking metrics commonly used to assess the relative merit of academic business journals. The guiding principle for the proposed approach is the simple and intuitively appealing idea that a journal in a given discipline should be judged relative to the prowess of the top journal(s) in its discipline. This ratio approach functions as a hybrid of the stated preference and revealed preference journal ranking ideologies, and accordingly offers several far reaching advantages, among them the ability to map all citation-based journal metrics to the zero-one interval, hence normalizing inter-metric and cross-disciplinary journal comparisons. The ratio approach also accounts for citation density across business fields and mitigates the effects of coercive citation, which can undermine cross-discipline journal comparisons if left unchecked.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation