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.

基于不同研究领域样本文章构建的综合期刊排名，常被用于衡量学术经济学家的研究产出水平。本文聚焦于经济学界日益凸显的一项担忧：若特定专业领域的期刊在综合排名中位次偏低，使用综合期刊排名评估学者相对研究产出时，可能会对该领域研究者产生向下偏倚。为解决这一问题，我们基于8个专业领域的研究学术影响力，构建了全新的期刊排名；研究样本涵盖1998年至2007年间60种经济学期刊刊发的26401篇文章。我们对专业领域内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反映专业领域内的文章质量水平。本文的补充材料可在线获取。