اندازه گیری ضریب تاثیر ژورنال های حسابداری با استفاده از گوگل پژوهشگر و گروه شاخص

The UK's proposed Research Excellence Framework promotes a move towards citation analysis for assessing research performance. However, for business disciplines, journal rankings are likely to remain an important aid in evaluating research quality. The accounting literature includes many journal rankings and citation studies, however there has been little coverage of recent advances in these areas. This study explores approaches to assessing the impact of accounting journals with a focus on quantitative measures as a complement to peer-review-based evaluation. New data sources and techniques for citation studies are reviewed, and the g-index is selected for further analysis. The g-index was developed by Professor Leo Egghe in 2006 as an improvement on the h-index. Like the h-index, the g-index represents a relationship between papers published and the level of citations they receive, but the g-index is more sensitive to highly cited paper. To apply the g-index to accounting journals, the study first combines eight published journals rankings to produce a list of 34 highly-regarded titles. Citation data are then gathered from Google Scholar and used to calculate g-index scores as the basis of a new ranking. Google Scholar is found to have broader coverage of accounting citations than Scopus or the Web of Science databases, but requires cleaning to remove duplicate entries. The use of the g-index for ranking journals is found to be a useful innovation in citation analysis, allowing a more robust assessment of the impact of journals.

This study has reviewed some of the techniques and data sources that can be used to assess the impact of research. The g-index has been applied to journals from the accounting discipline for the first time and appears to provide a useful score for use in ranking journals. Data for the g-index calculations were sourced from Google Scholar due to its convenience, low cost, and broader coverage of business sources. In an ideal world, academic performance would be assessed based on expert review of the merit of individual research. In practice, evaluation is aided by an understanding of the relative standing of the journals in which research is published. Citation-based rankings of journals are recognised as providing both a consistent and practical means of assessing research impact. However, traditional approaches to citation-based rankings of journals, such as the use of journal Impact Factors, have limitations. The results of the study show that some accounting journals that perform well in opinion surveys or Impact Factor rankings are not necessarily highly cited. Recent developments in citation analysis provide academics with more choices of data sources and methods for citation analysis. The g-index reflects the impact of a journal, and it allows a few highly cited articles to influence, but not dominate, the index score for the journal overall. The g-index values for journals are not difficult to calculate, particularly when compared to the effort involved in conducting an opinion survey. A perfect measure of journal impact is unlikely to ever exist, however g-index scores represent an improvement on current alternatives. As this was the first time the g-index has been used to rank journals in this way, the study suggests several areas for further research. As the major criticism of Google Scholar is its data quality it would be useful to track errors and duplicate entries in detail to provide clearer guidance to other researchers. It would also be valuable to repeat the study, but to gather citation data from within a restricted date range on Google Scholar to explore how this affects rankings. However, this type of study would require an appropriate date range to be determined and that necessitates careful analysis of citation patterns within the accounting discipline. Finally, it may be valuable to combine g-index data for journals with a robust and up-to-date opinion survey to create a ranking that captures both a quantitative assessment of journal impact, and stakeholders' perceptions of quality.