The intellectual influence of economic journals: quality versus quantity

Sociology (and profession) of mathematics (01A80) Statistical ranking and selection procedures (62F07) Statistical methods; economic indices and measures (91B82)

Review text

The paper under review introduces modified methods for quality indicators for academic journals that avoid manipulations on article-splitting, and uses them to provide scores and rankings for economic journals. Properly evaluating research activities from publishing in academic journals both cardinal and ordinal is not easy, even in narrow fields. \textit{E. Garfield} [``Citation indexes to science: a new dimension in documentation through association of ideas, Science 122 (3159), 108--111 (1955), \url{http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/papers/science1955.pdf}] introduces the predominant scoring method for measuring intellectual influence as the impact factor, \textit{S. J. Liebowitz} and \textit{J. C. Palmer} [``Assessing the relative impacts of economics journals, J. Econ. Lit. 22, No. 1, 77--88 (1984)] and \textit{D. N. Laband} and \textit{M. J. Piette} [``The relative impacts of economics journals: 1970--1990, J. Econ. Lit. 32, 640--666 (1994)] use the so-called LP method, and \textit{G. Pinski} and \textit{F. Narin} [``Citation influence for journal aggregates of scientific publications: theory, with application to the literature of physics, Inf. Process. Manag. 12, No. 5, 297--312 (1976)] introduce the invariant method. The core method of how search engines rank web pages is the PageRank algorithm developed by \textit{S. Brin} and \textit{L. Page} [``The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine, Comput. Netw. ISDN Syst. 30, No. 1--2, 107--117 (1998; \url{doi:10.1016/S0169-7552(98)00110-X}]. Let \(J=\{1, \dots, n\}\) be a finite set of academic journals. Define \(c_{ij}\) to be the number of citations to journal \(i\) by journal \(j\), \(c_j=\sum_{i\in J}c_{ij}\) be the total number of citations made by journal \(j\) and \(a_j\) be the total number of articles in journal \(j\). Then one can define the citation matrix \(C= (c_{ij})_{i, j\in J}\), the diagonal matrix \(D_C = \text{diag} (c_j)_{j\in J}\) be the diagonal matrix with elements in \(\{c_j\}_{j\in J}\). Similarly, the diagonal matrix \(A= \text{diag} (a_j)_{j\in J}\) be the diagonal matrix with elements in \(\{a_j\}_{j\in J}\). {\parindent=8mm \begin{itemize}\item[(i)] The impact factor gives valuations according to the valuation vector \(v\) that solves \(v = A^{-1}C e\), where \(A, C\) contain data for a two-year period and \(e\) is a vector of ones; \item[(ii)] The LP method gives \(v\) that solves \(v= \frac{A^{-1}C v}{\|A^{-1}C v\|}\); \item[(iii)] The invariant method gives \(v\) that solves \(v = A^{-1} C D_C^{-1}Av\). \end{itemize}} The modified impact factor, the modified LP method and the modified invariant method simply replace \(A\) by \(D_C\) in the above definitions. The authors give the scoring methods and definitions in Section 2 and prove that the impact factor, the LP method and the invariant method are biased against article-splitting in Theorem 1 of Section 3. The implications of the main result Theorem 1 show that quality and quantity are indistinguishable at article level and that those scoring methods are manipulable. Examples on scoring methods yielding the typical influence per page are also given in Section 3. Section 4 presents the authors' modified scoring methods that interpret a journal as an intermediary that adds value when converting inputs into outputs. These modifications allow restoring the desirable invariance into article-splitting. However, a precise result to the modified methods is not stated. In Section 5 the authors provide scores and rankings for economic journals that reflect the current trends in the influence of economic journals by adapting their modified methods.

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