Published, not perished, but has anybody read it? Citation success of finance research articles

Abstract

Citation counts are widely used in academia in hiring, tenure, promotion, salary increases, merit pay as well as to rank departments, journals and authors. However, no previous study examined the factors that influence citations in finance journals. This article examines how the number of citations is affected by authors’ collaboration, advertising and ‘salesmanship’ efforts, journals rank, article placement in the journal, and authors’ experience. We employ 16 years of data and use the Tobit model to study the number of citations. Also, we use the hazard model to estimate the probability of an article being cited for the first time. The empirical results show significant relation between the number of citations and the ranking of authors’ university, placement of an article in a journal, the length of an article, and the number of references included but no significant effect of collaboration, grant support, and the number of presentations and acknowledgments. Additionally, we conclude that it is important to use a long time series data to analyse citations in finance.

Keywords:

• quality
• collaboration
• duration analysis
• split model
• finance research

JEL Classification::

• C41
• G00

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by 2010 College of Business Summer Grant. The work was presented at Gdansk University, Poland in Summer 2007.

Notes

¹ In any case, the Tobit and OLS estimation yielded very similar results. We present only the Tobit results.

² The effect is significant for all journals and the four top-ranked journals but not for the five lower-ranked journals.

³ Also, we substituted the total number of references by the number of references per page and obtained similar results.

⁴ We have also estimated other specifications: Weibull, exponential, normal and gamma with very similar results. However, the logistic model provided the best fit.