Are Overall Journal Rankings a Good Mapping for Article Quality in Specialty Fields?

Overall journal rankings, which are generated with sample articles in different research fields, are commonly used to measure the research productivity of academic economists. In this article, we investigate a growing concern in the profession that the use of the overall journal rankings to evaluate scholars’ relative research productivity may exhibit a downward bias toward researchers in some specialty fields if their respective field journals are under-ranked in the overall journals rankings. To address this concern, we constructed new journal rankings based on the intellectual influence of research in 8 specialty fields using a sample consisting of 26,401 articles published across 60 economics journals from 1998 to 2007. We made various comparisons between the newly constructed journal rankings in specialty fields and the traditional overall journal ranking. Our results show that the overall journal ranking provides a considerably good mapping for the article quality in specialty fields. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.综合期刊排名依托不同研究领域的样本文章生成，常被用于衡量学术经济学家的研究产出水平。本文聚焦于学界日益凸显的一项担忧：若部分细分领域的专业期刊在综合期刊排名中位次偏低，那么利用综合期刊排名评估学者相对研究产出时，可能会对这些领域的研究者产生向下偏倚。为解决这一问题，本文基于1998年至2007年间60种经济学期刊刊载的26401篇样本文章的学术影响力，构建了8个细分领域的全新期刊排名。我们对细分领域新构建的期刊排名与传统综合期刊排名开展了多维度对比。研究结果表明，综合期刊排名能够较好地对应细分领域的文章质量水平。本文配套补充材料可在线获取。