رتبه بندی امور مالی ژورنال و ردیف ها: روش ارزیابی فعالیت پژوهشگر

This study uses respondent data from a web-based survey of active finance scholars (45% response rate from 37 countries) to endogenously rank 83 finance journals by quality and importance. Journals are further tiered into four groups (A, B, C and D) and stratified into “upper”, “middle” and “lower” tier categories (e.g. A+, A and A−) by estimating a nested regression with random journal-within-tier effects. The comprehensive and endogenous ranking of finance journals based on the Active Scholar Assessment (ASA) methodology can help authors evaluate the strategic aspects of placing their research, facilitate assessment of research achievement by tenure and promotion committees; and assist university libraries in better managing their journal resources. Study findings from active researchers in the field also provide useful guidance to editorial boards for enhancing their journal standing.

Academic journal rankings have become an important factor in assessing the significance of research in decisions regarding tenure, promotion, remuneration and research funding. These rankings frequently serve as a broad proxy for research quality and its impact. Prevailing methods for ranking journals may be broadly classified as (i) publication citation-based methods and (ii) peer assessment methods. The citation approach attempts to measure the impact of scholarship published in a journal by counting its papers referenced by other authors. Peer assessment-based studies survey select members of the finance academic community (e.g. Chairpersons of finance departments) and ask respondents to directly rank journals in the field. This paper carries out a web-based survey of active scholars in finance and uses respondent data to rank and tier journals in the field. The sample of active scholars in the study consists of authors who published in the most recent issues of 83 finance journals at the time of the survey. To avoid subjectivity in journal selection, the study uses a list of finance journals created by the Association of Business Schools (ABS) in the United Kingdom.1 An email requesting authors to complete the on-line questionnaire was sent to an effective survey sample of 866 active scholars, with two subsequent follow-up reminders. The survey elicited 390 responses from active finance scholars in 37 countries, yielding a response rate of 45%. The Active Scholar Assessment (ASA) methodology of this paper may be distinguished from other journal assessment studies in some important respects and the results can be useful to authors, promotion and tenure committees, libraries and editorial boards. First, the survey sample consists of active scholars who have published in recent issues of journals in the field and may be reasonably inferred as being more aware and current in their knowledge of journal quality. Second, the ASA methodology does not ask active scholars to sequentially rank journals as in other assessment studies, but determines relative rankings as an endogenous function of active scholar perceptions of quality and awareness of each journal. We believe that this imposes a much lower cognitive and memory burden on respondents and improves the quality of survey results (for example, can respondents asked to consecutively rank journals differentiate between journals ranked in positions 6–7, or 79–80, for that matter). Third, the ASA methodology also tiers journals into four groups (A, B, C and D) based on their quality and importance rankings and uses a nested random-effects regression model to further stratify them into upper and lower tier categories (e.g. A+, A and A−). These results can be useful to tenure and promotion committees who frequently evaluate candidate publication records in terms of such categories (e.g. does a publication fall in the “A” or “B+” journal group). The regression analysis also provides insights on the relation between respondent scores, tier-levels and respondent characteristics. Fourth, in addition to ranking and stratifying journals by perceptions of journal quality, the ASA study also provides rankings by journal importance to the field. The importance to the field score for each journal is defined as the product of the journal’s average relative quality times its percent level of awareness by survey respondents and has a simple utility interpretation. Scholars publishing in academic journals may be seen as deriving utility from a journal’s perceived quality as well as its reach or awareness within the field (the latter is positively linked to the potential of increasing a paper’s citations and research impact). For instance, in considering journals following the premier journals (e.g. top 2–3 journals), an author of a quantitative paper may be indifferent between publishing in a technically rigorous journal with smaller readership and a broader journal with higher readership. This tradeoff may be represented by utility isoquants over journal quality and level of journal awareness. This utility interpretation of the importance score offers one justification for using it to rank academic journals. In the study, we report results for journal rankings (and tiers) using both quality and the importance scores. The paper also compares journal ranking results from the Active Scholar Assessment study with other sources including the ABS Academic Journal Quality Guide and Thomson Reuters’ ISI Journal Citation Reports. The ISI Citation Report for “Business Finance” journals ranks 48 journals of which 24 are finance journals and the remainder are from accounting and other disciplines. Furthermore, we find a more monotone and less steep descent in both quality and importance measures after the top ranked finance journals in comparison to citation-based rankings. For example, while the Journal of Finance has average quality (importance) scores of 4.84 out of 5 (78.7 out of 100), the 5th, 10th and 20th ranked journals have quality (importance) scores of 4.03 (58.3), 3.66 (35.4) and 3.31 (28.7), respectively. In contrast, citation-based metrics exhibit a much sharper decline beyond the top few citation-ranked journals and their magnitude remains small and clustered over the remaining journals (Chung et al., 2001).2 For instance, the 2009 Thomson Reuters’ ISI citation impact factors for the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 10th and 20th ranked finance journals are 4.02, 3.55, 1.63, 1.21 and 0.57, respectively (Table 3). This suggests that the quality of finance journals following the premier three journals, as perceived by active finance scholars, is higher than what citation-based methods may appear to suggest. Some researchers including Chan et al., 2000, Arnold et al., 2003 and Krishnan and Bricker, 2004 have suggested that the steep decline may be due to a self-citation group-bias among authors publishing in the premier finance journals. The more monotonic decline in quality and importance measures over journal rankings and lack of clustering suggest that the active scholar peer assessment methodology may be less influenced by this type of potential citation bias. It has also been suggested that the more gradual decline in quality across journal ranks may be due to respondent subjectivity and bias. This is considered in more detail later (Section 5.2) and we argue that the ASA survey design minimizes the effect of such potential bias. The remaining paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the relation of the proposed ASA methodology to previous studies on journal assessment. Section 3 describes the survey design and data collection and the journal assessment methodology follows in Section 4. Results on journal ranks and tiers are presented and discussed in Section 5. This section also reports the results from nested random-effects regression analysis used to stratify journals into upper and lower tier categories within tiers and evaluate the impact of respondent characteristics. Section 6 concludes the paper.

This study carries out a web-based peer assessment of active finance scholars and uses respondent data to rank and tier 83 finance journals. Within each tier, journals are further stratified into upper, middle and lower categories (e.g. A+, A and A−) using a nested random-effects regression. In addition to rankings by journal quality (1–5 scale), the study also provides rankings by journal importance to the field (defined as the product of average journal relative quality and awareness) which may be interpreted as scholar utility over journal quality and awareness. The response rate for the on-line survey is 45%, with 390 responses from active scholars in 37 countries. The proposed Active Scholar Assessment (ASA) methodology differs from other journal assessment studies in some noteworthy respects and the results have a number of uses and applications. First, the survey sample is made up of active scholars who can be reasonably inferred as being more aware and current in their knowledge of journal quality. Second, the study imposes a low cognitive and memory burden on respondents as it endogenously determines journal rankings and stratification using responses on quality and awareness for each journal (e.g. active scholars are not asked to sequentially rank journals as in other assessment studies). Third, in comparison to citation-based rankings, average journal quality scores from the ASA survey exhibit a more monotone and less steep descent following the top ranked journals. This suggests that perception of journal quality by active finance scholars following the premier outlets is higher than reflected by purely citation-based measures. Lastly, the comprehensive and endogenous ranking of finance journals based on the ASA methodology can help authors evaluate the strategic aspects of placing their research; facilitate assessment of research achievement by tenure and promotion committees; and assist university libraries in better managing their journal resources.