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Abstract
The article focuses on the robustness of rankings of academic journal quality and research impact in general, and in economics, in particular, based on the widely-used Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science citations database (ISI). The article analyzes 299 leading international journals in economics using quantifiable Research Assessment Measures (RAMs), and highlights the similarities and differences in various RAMs, which are based on alternative transformations of citations and influence. All existing RAMs to date have been static, so two new dynamic RAMs are developed to capture changes in impact factor over time and escalating journal self-citations. Alternative RAMs may be calculated annually or updated daily to determine When, Where, and How (frequently) published articles are cited (see Chang et al., 2011a–c). The RAMs are grouped in four distinct classes that include impact factor, mean citations, and non-citations, journal policy, number of high quality articles, journal influence, and article influence. These classes include the most widely used RAMs, namely, the classic 2-year impact factor including journal self-citations (2YIF), 2-year impact factor excluding journal self citations (2YIF*), 5-year impact factor including journal self citations (5YIF), Eigenfactor (or Journal Influence), Article Influence, h-index, and Papers Ignored–By Even The Authors (PI-BETA). As all existing RAMs to date have been static, two new dynamic RAMs are developed to capture changes in impact factor over time (5YD2 = 5YIF/2YIF) and Escalating Self-Citations (ESC). We highlight robust rankings based on the harmonic mean of the ranks of RAMs across the four classes. It is shown that emphasizing the 2YIF of a journal, which partly answers the question as to When published articles are cited, to the exclusion of other informative RAMs, which answer Where and How (frequently) published articles are cited, can lead to a distorted evaluation of journal quality, impact, and influence relative to the harmonic mean of the ranks.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors are grateful to two referees for helpful comments and suggestions.
Notes
The journals are ranked according to 2YIF. The journal acronyms are taken from ISI. Daily RAMs are not reported when there are more than 10,000 articles, so the data for American Economic Review are from 1964, Value in Health from 2006, Economic Journal from 1957, American Journal of Agricultural Economics from 1984, and Journal of Economic History from 1962. Data for all other journals are from their inception. The data were downloaded from ISI on August 10, 2011.
The journals are ranked according to the harmonic mean of the ranks, which is given as Harmonic Mean. The harmonic mean of the ranks is calculated as the harmonic mean of the ranks of the h-index (Class 3), the ranks of Eigenfactor (Class 4), and the harmonic mean of the ranks of Class 1 (2YIF, 2YIF*, C3PO, PI-BETA). The difference reported in the last column is 2YIF–Harmonic Mean.