A New Method for Ranking Academic Journals in Accounting and Finance

Abstract

Given the many and varied uses to which journal rankings are put, interest in ranking journal 'quality' is likely to persist. Unfortunately, existing methods of constructing such rankings all have inherent limitations. This paper proposes a new (complementary) approach, based on submissions to RAE 2001, which is not restricted to a pre-defined journal set and, importantly, is based on quality choice decisions driven by economic incentives. For three metrics, submissions to RAE 2001 are compared with the available set of publications to provide evidence on the perception of journal quality, a fourth metric is based on the overall RAE grades, and an overall ranking is produced.

The UK Research Assessment Exercise: Performance Measurement and Resource Allocation

“…Whether this made a difference to the outcome of the research funding allocations in broad terms is debateable. In accounting, work has been done that shows the correlation between the rankings of submitted work that might have been given on the basis of place of publication and those that have been awarded (Beattie and Goodacre 2006). Nevertheless, the impact on individual researchers who could be pushed to research in order to achieve publications in a narrower range of journals might well be significant.…”

Co‐authorship Network Analysis in the Accounting Discipline

“…, , ; Englebrecht et al. ; Gaunt ), accounting journal rankings (Ballas and Theoharakis ; Beattie and Goodacre ; Bonner et al. ; Chan et al.…”

“…Scholarly journals, among other channels, play a fundamental role in the dissemination of academic work (Merigó and Yang 2017). Therefore, we systematically analysed past accounting literature from several perspectives such as topicality (Prather-Kinsey and Rueschhoff 2004;Oler et al 2010Oler et al , 2016, research productivity of institutions and authors (Henry and Burch 1974;Heck and Bremser 1986;Chung et al 1992;Carmona et al 1999;Hasselback et al 2003;Chan et al 2005Chan et al , 2006Chan et al , 2007Englebrecht et al 2008a;Gaunt 2014), accounting journal rankings (Ballas and Theoharakis 2003;Beattie and Goodacre 2006;Bonner et al 2006;Chan et al 2012) and so on. One focus of the prior literature is identification of authorship patterns and the extent of collaboration.…”

Ranking of finance journals: a stochastic dominance analysis

“…Second, potential students at large use the quality of scholars in making enrollment decisions. Third, academic institutions are likely to use a faculty member's quality of publications to make decisions on promotion and merit pay, while journal-ranking benchmarks provide faculty members with useful information in making submission decisions (Beattie and Goodacre, 2006;Chan et al, 2013). Finally, research on ranking journals can help us decide what to read and which journals are influential (Arnold et al, 2003).…”

“…The first is a survey-based approach, in which the researchers design questionnaires and send them to a predetermined group of experts (respondents) to ask for their opinion regarding journal ranking, for example, Borde et al (1999) and Coe and Weinstock (1983). However, the survey approach suffers from limitations including respondents' perception bias, nonresponse bias, sample representation biases (Chan and Liano, 2009;Moosa, 2011), position bias (i.e., journal placement in the list may bias responses) (Brown and Huefner, 1994), and self-serving predisposition bias toward various journals (Beattie and Goodacre, 2006), particularly those in which the respondent either published or acts as a reviewer or a member of the editorial board. This last approach, in other words, is necessarily subjective because it relies on human judgment.…”