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Another brick in the wall: a new ranking of academic journals in Economics using FDH

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Abstract

The academic journals rankings are widely used for academic purposes, especially in the field of Economics. There are many procedures to construct academic journals rankings. Some of them are based on citation analysis while other are based on expert opinion. In this study, we introduced a methodological innovation to aggregate different performance measures to build an alternative ranking of journals in Economics. Our approach is based on a pure output oriented Free Disposal Hull (FDH). We analyzed four indicators—Journal Impact Factor, Discounted Impact Factor, h-index, and Article Influence—for a set of 232 journals in Economics. The results allow us to reach two main conclusions. First, the ranking based on the FDH method seems to be consistent with other well-known reference rankings (i.e.: KMS, Invariant, Ambitious and Area Score). Second, the additional information that provides the FDH model may be used by the Editorial Board to formulate strategies to achieve goals. For instance, to improve a journal score by comparing it with the scores of similar journals.

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Notes

  1. Free disposability in inputs and outputs for P(x) means that if (x, y) ∈ P(x) then (x′, y′) ∈ P(x) for any x′ ≥ x and y′ ≤ y.

  2. It could be always possible to make an efficiency analysis including journal inputs as to having a stronger back office, more budget or others. In this paper, as well as in traditional AJR, we focus our attention in measuring the effectiveness dimension regardless the input side.

  3. The FDH could be extended for dealing with large random noise or measurement errors through the robust order-m estimator proposed by Cazals et al. (2002). This approach is related to the FDH estimator, but instead of constructing a full frontier, it creates a number of partial frontiers that envelops only m (≥1) observations randomly drawn from the original sample to build confident intervals for the evaluated journals.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business Administration, IE University, c/María de Molina 31 Bis, 28006, Madrid, Spain

    Antonio García-Romero

  2. Department of Applied Economics VI, Complutense University of Madrid, 28223, Pozuelo de Alarcón, Spain

    Daniel Santín & Gabriela Sicilia

Authors
  1. Antonio García-Romero
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  2. Daniel Santín
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  3. Gabriela Sicilia
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Correspondence to Antonio García-Romero.

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García-Romero, A., Santín, D. & Sicilia, G. Another brick in the wall: a new ranking of academic journals in Economics using FDH. Scientometrics 107, 91–101 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1843-3

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