Are Overall Journal Rankings a Good Mapping for Article Quality in Specialty Fields?

Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, 2016, 34:1, 62-67

Posted: 27 Feb 2016

See all articles by Melody Lo

Melody Lo

University of Texas at San Antonio

Yong Bao

Purdue University

Date Written: February 18, 2016

Abstract

Overall journal rankings, which are generated with sample articles in different research fields, are commonly used to measure the research productivity of academic economists. In this article, we investigate a growing concern in the profession that the use of the overall journal rankings to evaluate scholars’ relative research productivity may exhibit a downward bias toward researchers in some specialty fields if their respective field journals are under-ranked in the overall journals rankings. To address this concern, we constructed new journal rankings based on the intellectual influence of research in 8 specialty fields using a sample consisting of 26,401 articles published across 60 economics journals from 1998 to 2007. We made various comparisons between the newly constructed journal rankings in specialty fields and the traditional overall journal ranking. Our results show that the overall journal ranking provides a considerably good mapping for the article quality in specialty fields. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Keywords: Citations, Economics journals, Impact, Ranking, Specialty field journals

Suggested Citation

Lo, Melody and Bao, Yong, Are Overall Journal Rankings a Good Mapping for Article Quality in Specialty Fields? (February 18, 2016). Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, 2016, 34:1, 62-67, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2734379

Melody Lo (Contact Author)

University of Texas at San Antonio ( email )

One UTSA Circle
San Antonio, TX 78249
United States

Yong Bao

Purdue University ( email )

Department of Economics
West Lafayette, IN 47907
United States

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