Twenty Years of Business and Economic Education Research: Ranking Analysis of the Journals

ABSTRACT

– This paper uses Google Scholar citations to produce a novel ranking of journals in the fields of business and economic education. In doing so, we use the top 10 articles published in each of 38 business and economic education journals over the last 20 years, in addition to all articles published by journals in these fields over the past five years. The results indicate that the Journal of Teaching in International Business holds the highest-ranking position among international business education journals. The study also discusses changes in the publication landscape, with special attention to the impact of some of the newest journals in business and economic education. Lastly, we provide some discussion of scholarship in international business education, an area that has been understudied in prior research.

KEYWORDS:

• Business and economic education research
• journal rankings

Acknowledgment

The authors thank two anonymous reviewers, Raj Aggarwal and Yinglu Wu for helpful comments on a prior version of this study. The usual caveat applies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ See Qian, Caudill, and Mixon (2016) for a related study concerning the prevalence, or lack thereof, of traditional forms of research at teaching-focused (liberal arts) institutions.

² Asarta et al. (2018) also assert that due to external stakeholder pressures for excellent, evidence-based instruction, institutions that do subordinate business and management education research to discipline-based scholarship will be forced to reframe their research portfolios.

³ A follow-up study by Lo et al. (2015) finds that the Journal of Economic Education ranks seventh using a citations-based approach. There, the top three journals are the Journal of Economic Literature, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and the American Economic Review.

⁴ As Asarta, Jennings, and Grimes (2017) indicate, The American Economist has a long and significant history of publishing research in the field of economic education.

⁵ A related study by Fornaciari et al. (2017) produces two top 100 rankings, one based on the raw number of author publications and the other based on weighted scores reflecting journal quality and co-authorship.

⁶ This process could have begun by using the portfolio of journals from the Chartered Associated of Business Schools (CABS). However, in filling in the gaps as described above, our resulting list of journals would mirror that found utilizing the ABDC portfolio as a foundation.

⁷ Where available, the journal’s international standard serial number (ISSN) was used to locate citations through Publish or Perish.

⁸ Here, we extend a technique used in a stream of studies by Mixon and Upadhyaya (2001; 2016a, 2016b), which indicates that this is an efficient way of scoring and ranking academic departments that correlates well with more comprehensive approaches.

⁹ In other words, to create the citations index each journal’s sum of citations was divided by that of the Academy of Management Learning & Education, the most-cited journal in the field. Thus, for journal j this index is equal to the sum of citations to j’s 10 most cited articles divided by the sum of citations to the 10 most cited articles published in the Academy of Management Learning & Education. To create a percentage, this ratio is multiplied by 100, as reported in Table 1. This practice follows that in Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneaus, and Stengos (2011), a highly-cited study ranking journals in the field of economics. Studies by Mixon and Upadhyaya (2021; 2022a, 2022b) also follow this practice.

¹⁰ See Mixon and Upadhyaya (2008) for a study of the uncitedness phenomenon in economic education research.

¹¹ A journal’s h-index is defined as the maximum value of h such that the journal has published at least h papers that have each been cited at least h times (Hirsch 2005).

¹² The second-most impactful study appearing in the Journal of International Education in Business is that by Zhao and Ferran (2016) on business school accreditation. However, with 48 Google Scholar cites, there is quite a large gap in the impact of this study and that by Tarhini et al. (2017).

¹³ The Journal of Marketing Education’s ranking here is based on its average ranking across Tables 1 and 2.

¹⁴ The study by Alon and Herath (2014) has to date garnered 66 Google Scholar citations.

¹⁵ The studies by Gonzalez-Perez et al. (2014) and Feng (2016) rank as the fourth-most impactful (tie), with each garnering 40 Google Scholar citations to date.

¹⁶ These studies have each garnered 26 Google Scholar citations to date.

¹⁷ One of the authors of the instant research has been affiliated with a business school that followed this practice by capping the value of a business or economic education journal at “B.”

¹⁸ Again, one of the authors of the instant research has been affiliated with a university that annually conferred a university-wide award based accomplishments related to “the scholarship of teaching,” which encompassed publication in teaching-related academic journals. In fact, the annual winner of the award moved on to compete against similar winners from the state’s other public colleges and universities in a statewide contest.

¹⁹ See https://www.southerneconomic.org/kenneth-g-elzinga-distinguished-teaching-award/.

²⁰ See https://college.unc.edu/2012/11/salemi/.

²¹ The aforementioned Elzinga Award is accompanied by a $500 monetary prize. A review of field experiments in this area by Kosfeld and Neckermann (2011) attests to the power of awards and recognition in motivating employees by indicating that even a purely symbolic award motivates a 12% increase in recipients’ workplace performance (Kosfeld and Neckermann 2011).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article

Notes on contributors

Diego Méndez-Carbajo

Diego Mendez-Carbajo currently serves on the editorial board of The American Economist. His research in business and economic education appears in the Journal of Economic Education, International Review of Economics Education, Perspectives on Economic Education Research, Journal of Economics Teaching and the Journal of Education for Busines

Franklin G. Mixon

Franklin G. Mixon Jr. currently serves on the editorial boards of Perspectives on Economic Education Research and the Journal of Economics and Finance Education. In addition to these, his research in economic education appears in the Journal of Economic Education, International Review of Economics Education, Journal for Economic Educators, and the Australasian Journal of Economics Educatio