Rank variability of the Publish or Perish metrics for economics and finance journals

Abstract

This article analyses the 10 citation-based journal ranking metrics reported by Harzing's (2007) Publish or Perish (PoP) software (http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm) for 163 economics and finance journals. The results indicate that the 10 metrics produce rankings that are highly correlated. However, closer examination reveals that the variability in rank across the 10 metrics is significantly larger for some journals than others; this article identifies journals for which this is most poignant and offers possible solutions.

Keywords:

• Publish or Perish
• h-index
• g-index
• journal ranking

JEL Classification:

• A10
• A11
• A12

Notes

¹ http://www.aacsb.edu/publications/researchreports/currentreports/impact-of-research.pdf

² Another online ranking source can be found at http://www.eigenfactor.org/

³ Similarly, the relative merits of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Journal Impact Factor (JIF) versus the Google Scholar-based approaches are left to prior research; see, for example, Harzing and van der Wal (2009). Additionally, it is worth noting that there is often a very high correlation between stated and revealed preference orderings (Mingers and Harzing, 2007; Bontis and Serenko, 2009), suggesting that the rankings from either method may agree.

⁴ Details about these metrics can be found at http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm

⁵ Unsurprisingly, using the range of ranks as the dependent variable gives very similar regression results.

⁶ Some stated journal ranking results can be found at http://www.harzing.com/download/jql_journal.pdf