Aspects of the Production of Significant Financial Research

Abstract

ALTHOUGH IT IS NOT a perfect measure, an academic publication's impact or significance can probably best be judged by the number of times it is cited by subsequent articles in the field. Using this index of significance for articles published in the Journal of Finance (JOF) and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (JFQA) over the period 1967-1972, this article explores several aspects of the production and publication of 'significant' financial research. Key questions are the extent to which finance articles differ in their impact, how highly cited articles differ from articles which are rarely cited, and the extent to which a ranking of finance departments by citations differs from a ranking in terms of articles or pages published.Since the study is based on the proposition that an article's significance or quality can best be measured in terms of the number of times it is cited by other writers, the advantages and disadvantages of this measure are discussed in Part I before the significance and importance of financial research articles are explored in Part II and before questions concerning article importance and the author's institutional affiliation are considered in III. Characteristics of significant articles are examined in Part IV and the study's results are summarized in V. I. Citation Counts as Indices of Importance As noted above, this study uses the number of times an article appears in the reference lists of subsequent articles as an index of the original article's signifi-cance or importance. These citations were obtained from the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) which was first published in 1974 and has since been published for the years 1969 to date. For articles published in JOF or JFQA during the period 1968-1971, our citation counts consisted of all citations from subsequent articles which were listed in the SSCI over a six year period beginning the year after publication.' Since the SSCI was not available for 1968 and 1978, only five years of citations were collected for articles published in 1967 and 1972. Only the articles for which a full six years of citation data were available (345 articles from 1968 through 1971) are used for the statistical tests in this study. The rankings of articles and institutions are based on the expanded sample (528 articles) after adjustment of the citation counts for 1968 and 1972 articles to a six year basis. For the average article with a full six years of data, the citations in the * Georgia State University. 'The list of journals from which the Social Science Citation Index collects citations is quite extensive and is listed in any volume of the SSCI. 777

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