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The influence of dispersion on journal impact measures

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Abstract

A family of measures of a journal’s impact is considered that takes account of the dispersion, as well as the mean, of the number of citations in a journal. These measures, called the Mean Dispersion Indices (MDI), generalize the stabilized-JIF recently introduced by Lando and Bertoli-Barsotti (J Informetr 11(3):689–703, 2017). The MDI use a geometric weighted average of the number of citations and the Gini coefficient to measure the dispersion of the number of citations. Journal rankings based on these measures are compared with those obtained from the Journal Impact Factor, the Scimago Journal Rank, the h-index measure, and the Eigenfactor rankings, four of the most well-known current impact measures. This comparison suggests that the different rankings may implicitly place different weights on dispersion and the average number of citations and some appear to show little correlation with dispersion.

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Notes

  1. The Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) is a widely used index not included in this paper. It is calculated by dividing the mean number of citations in a 3-year period by a scalar that is determined based on the subject area. It allows comparing journals across disciplines. This would suggest that within disciplines SNIP rankings will not vary much from the rankings produced by the JIF when applied to the same citation database. Since this paper is focused within the Economics discipline, SNIP is not included in the comparisons.

  2. These exceptions were mainly found in computer science related fields since many of the prominent publications are conference proceedings. Since this paper uses economics journals, these differences should not affect the analysis.

  3. Formerly Thomson Reuters Web of Science.

  4. The h-index included in this report uses a 5 years time window (see Table 7).

  5. For example, if your list of journal citations were (1, 10, 100), the Gini coefficient would be equal to \(\frac{{\left| {1 - 10} \right| + \left| {1 - 100} \right| + \left| {10 - 1} \right| + \left| {10 - 100} \right| + \left| {100 - 1} \right| + \left| {100 - 10} \right|}}{{2*3*\left( {1 + 10 + 100} \right)}} = 0.595\).

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Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate the helpful and supportive comments provided by the editor and referees.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, 84602, USA

    William M. Cockriel & James B. McDonald

Authors
  1. William M. Cockriel
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  2. James B. McDonald
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to James B. McDonald.

Appendix

Appendix

Table of All 56 Journals with Mean and Gini Coefficient for the 2 years period leading up to 2014.

 

Journal

Mean

Gini coefficient

1

American Economic Review

3.7618

0.6002

2

American Journal of Agricultural Economics

1.2038

0.6966

3

Annual Review of Economics

2.9762

0.5731

4

Brookings Papers On Economic Activity

3.0833

0.6903

5

Cambridge Journal of Economics

1.5037

0.6310

6

Ecological Economics

2.7991

0.5702

7

Econometrica

4.0347

0.4906

8

Economic Development and Cultural Change

1.3774

0.5795

9

Economic Geography

2.0645

0.5796

10

Economic Journal

2.0863

0.5112

11

Economic Policy

2.6364

0.5670

12

Economic Systems Research

3.3333

0.7279

13

Economy and Society

1.6364

0.6521

14

Emerging Markets Review

1.4815

0.5259

15

Energy Economics

2.9622

0.5717

16

Energy Journal

1.6282

0.6640

17

European Journal of Political Economy

1.5229

0.5942

18

European Review of Agricultural Economics

1.1143

0.6070

19

Food Policy

1.8022

0.5845

20

Journal of Agricultural Economics

1.2278

0.6454

21

Journal of Applied Econometrics

1.5636

0.6738

22

Journal of Econometrics

1.7769

0.5571

23

Journal of Economic Geography

2.5227

0.5839

24

Journal of Economic Growth

3.5417

0.6123

25

Journal of Economic History

1.4355

0.6029

26

Journal of Economic Literature

6.2927

0.5576

27

Journal of Economic Perspectives

5.5517

0.5461

28

Journal of Economic Surveys

2.2105

0.5500

29

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management

2.6984

0.5965

30

Journal of Finance

5.4961

0.4606

31

Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis

1.5310

0.6177

32

Journal of Financial Econometrics

1.2326

0.6222

33

Journal of Financial Economics

4.1661

0.5606

34

Journal of Human Resources

1.4928

0.5499

35

Journal of International Economics

2.6865

0.6027

36

Journal of Labor Economics

2.0357

0.5132

37

Journal of Monetary Economics

1.7297

0.5811

38

Journal of Political Economy

3.6271

0.4754

39

Journal of Public Economics

1.6162

0.6108

40

Journal of Urban Economics

1.6848

0.5524

41

Land Economics

1.4125

0.7006

42

Marine Resource Economics

1.8571

0.6398

43

Mathematical Finance

1.1290

0.6171

44

Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics

1.3218

0.6435

45

Quantitative Economics

1.7667

0.4849

46

Quarterly Journal of Economics

7.2346

0.5582

47

Rand Journal of Economics

1.3594

0.6302

48

Review of Economic Dynamics

1.4110

0.6472

49

Review of Economic Studies

4.1827

0.5376

50

Review of Economics and Statistics

2.7487

0.5600

51

Review of Environmental Economics and Policy

3.5161

0.4782

52

Review of Financial Studies

3.0955

0.5217

53

Review of International Political Economy

1.7867

0.6714

54

Small Business Economics

1.8995

0.5950

55

World Bank Economic Review

1.3721

0.6985

56

World Development

2.0701

0.5883

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Cockriel, W.M., McDonald, J.B. The influence of dispersion on journal impact measures. Scientometrics 116, 609–622 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2755-1

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