Citations, journal ranking and multiple authorships: evidence based on the top 300 papers in economics

ABSTRACT

Two propositions are examined with reference to the top 300 papers in economics journals in terms of citations as reported by RePec. The results show that while there is significant correlation between the quality of a journal and the number of top papers published in that journal, the correlation is far away from being perfect. Furthermore, citations are not related to the number of authors, which provides evidence against the proposition that multi-authored papers are typically of higher quality than single-authored papers. The results also cast a shadow of doubt on the soundness of the bucket classification of journals.

KEYWORDS:

• Citations
• publications in economics
• single-authored papers
• multiple authorships

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• A10
• A20

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.item.nbcites.html

² The paper appearing at the top and bottom of the list are Lucas (1988) and Blanchflower and Oswald (1998), respectively.

³ The website is http://www.scimagojr.com/index.php

⁴ Similar bucket classification systems include the Cefage Rankings (where Journal are classified as AAA, AA, A, B, C and D), the Kiel Institute Internal Ranking (where journal are classified as A, B+, B, B- and C) and the Keele list (where journals are classified as 4, 3, 2 or 1). For a critique of the bucket classification of journals, see Moosa (2016).

⁵ The importance of hypothesis testing for this purpose is emphasised by Schubert and Glanzel (1983) who argue that ‘reliable comparisons based on citation rates per publication can be performed only with an appropriate test of statistical significance of the observed differences’.

⁶ The t-Statistic for the null that the mean is equal to 1 is 19.80.

⁷ With reference to economics journals, they argue that ‘lower acceptance rates and longer delays have made it increasingly difficult for any one author to achieve a given set of publication benchmarks’ and that ‘authors have responded by forming bigger teams, and to the extent that co-authored papers are treated as equivalent to single-authored ones, they have been able to partially mitigate the adverse effects of lower acceptance rates and longer delays’.