Citations, journal ranking and multiple authorships reconsidered: evidence from almost one million articles

ABSTRACT

In this article, we reconsider the investigation by Moosa (2016) using a much larger data set of almost one million articles listed in Research Papers in Economics. This article provides new insights into the effects of co-authorship on citation counts and the correlation between quality of papers and quality of the publishing journal. Our evidence is partially in contrast to the results reported in Moosa (2016). We find a positive correlation between the h-index of a journal and the quality of papers measured in terms of citations. This correlation becomes almost perfect using a nonlinear model. Results from a regression of citation counts on the number of authors show evidence of a positive and significant effect of co-authorship on the quality of a paper when time effects and large sets of top-cited articles are taken into account. The inclusion of time effects and the large data set, that allows to differentiate between top-cited cohorts, adds further insights to the existing literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Citations
• multiple authorship
• journal quality
• RePEc

JEL CLASSIFICATIONS:

• A12
• A14

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ This is the same database which is also been used in Rath and Wohlrabe (2016a) and in Rath and Wohlrabe (2016b).