Which Journal Rankings Best Explain Academic Salaries? Evidence From the University of California

Abstract

The ranking of an academic journal is important to authors, universities, journal publishers, and research funders. Rankings are gaining prominence as countries adopt regular research assessment exercises that especially reward publication in high‐impact journals. Yet even within a rankings‐oriented discipline like economics there is no agreement on how aggressively lower‐ranked journals are down‐weighted and in how wide is the universe of journals considered. Moreover, since it is typically less costly for authors to cite superfluous references, whether of their own volition or prompted by editors, than it is to ignore relevant ones, rankings based on citations may be easily manipulated. In contrast, when the merits of publication in one journal or another are debated during hiring, promotion, and salary decisions, the evaluators are choosing over actions with costly consequences. We therefore look to the academic labor market, using data on economists in the University of California system to relate their lifetime publications in 700 different academic journals to salary. We test amongst various sets of journal rankings, and publication discount rates, to see which are most congruent with the returns implied by the academic labor market. (JEL A14, I23, J44)

Parenthood and productivity of highly skilled labor: Evidence from the groves of academe

“…The gender wage gap in academia has narrowed over time but still persists (Kahn, 1995;Faggian and Della Giusta, 2008). Controlling, however, for the prestige of the PhD-granting institution, experience, seniority, and especially for research productivity, substantially reduces the net wage gap (Ward, 2001) and may even close it altogether (Gibson, Anderson, and Tressler, 2012). This finding is well in line with the results of similar studies on nonacademic groups of highly educated workers such as college graduates (Black, Haviland, Sanders, and Taylor, 2008) and MBAs (Bertrand, Goldin, and Katz, 2010).…”

“…The gender gap is, of course, crucial for the relationship between parenthood and career success in academia. This is so because, on the one hand, research productivity is the key determinant for academic advancement (Hamermesh, Johnson, and Weisbrod, 1982;Sauer, 1988;Gibson, Anderson, and Tressler, 2012). On the other hand, family formation is likely to have a decided influence on productivity.…”

Academic Rankings with RePEc

“…[6][7][8] use RePEc data to compute some alternative rankings of economists, and in the last case to categorize them in archetypes. [9] use the RePEc journal impact factors to determine the impact of a publication on academic salaries in California universites. [10,11] use the RePEc author rankings to analyse the distribution of citations across authors within cohorts.…”

“…We have 34 different ways to rank authors; 9 thus if we want to compare how differently they perform, we need to look at 1,122 correlations (34 2 − 34). Table 4 reports them along with correlations with the harmonic average of rank (excluding extreme ranks), which is used as the default for aggregate rankings.…”

Russian Index of Science Citation: Overview and Review

“…There is even a case when a Lithuanian journal with low international visibility was ranked third(!) in the economics category of Journal Citation Reports database (Gibson et al 2012).…”