Author and article characteristics, journal quality and citation in economic research

Abstract

Citation count serves as an indicator of quality of research in economics as well as in many other disciplines. The purpose of this article is to examine the effects of author and article characteristics on the citations in economics research. We investigate empirically the relationship between citations and author and article characteristics for different journal quality. We found that the same institution (affiliation) and the location of authors may affect the citation positively. Moreover, journal quality affects some of these variables differently. This article also provides rationales for these results.

Notes

¹According to Laband and Tollison (2003), 20% of all published articles do not receive any citation.

²Medoff (2003) found that the favourable article placement sends an inaccurate signal to readers about the quality of paper in the short run but later readers correctly evaluate the true quality of articles.

³The exception is Laband and Piette (1994a) who examined the connection between authors and editors. They claimed that this should not be viewed as favouritism. Instead, they found that professional connection enables journal editors ‘to identify and capture’ high-quality papers.

⁴It should be noted that all the 38 journals are highly respected in the economics profession. The word ‘bottom’ by no means indicates that they are so. Most authors, including the authors of this article, try hard to publish one more article in them. Bulk portion of professors fail to publish just one article in these journals. Moreover, different criteria would generate different rankings of journals. Thus, the ranking of journals in this article should be viewed as provisional and should not be given too much weight.

⁵In a separate regression, we could obtain the positive effect of the number of authors on citations, even though this regression result is not reported here.

⁶On the other hand, the location dummy for journals is significant with only 90% confidence interval. In other words, the location may not play an important role in mostly cited journals. This is because the authors who can publish in these journals have already overcome the location barrier and do not seem to concern too much about the reputation effect either.