Bibliographic Measures of Top-Tier Finance, Information Systems, and Management Science Journals

Abstract

Purpose: Faculty research is frequently the basis of pay, tenure, and promotion decisions in the university arena. Meanwhile, perceptions regarding the quantity and quality of the research produced by a faculty is often the basis of departmental, college, and university reputation. The journal in which research findings are published is often used to assess the overall research quality. In order to better benchmark journal quality, this report provides findings of a meticulous investigation of leading journals in the finance, information systems and management science disciplines. It examines four different citation-based measures of quality and four journal characteristics that are exogenous to the quality of any individual piece of research. In unison, these investigative paths provide a clearer understanding of journal quality across the business realm, and hence of the quality of research appearing in business journals. Design: This study assists in the development of an accurate perception regarding business research through a careful analysis of the popular Journal Citation Reports (JCR) impact factor across leading journals in three diverse business disciplines. By considering three newer journal quality metrics, a.) SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), b.) Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), and c.) Percentage of articles cited, this research builds on past research. Top-tier journals in finance, information systems, and operations research and management science (referred to here as “management science ”) are compared to evaluate the consistency of these measures across disciplines. The differences in journal characteristics and their impact on the citation-rate based measures of quality are also analyzed. Further, the potential impact of a discipline-based variation in the acceptance rate, issue frequency, the time since journal inception, and total reviewers are put forth as additional potential exogenous factors that may influence the perception of the overall journal quality. T-tests are applied for discipline comparisons, while correlation and multiple regression are employed in the analysis of journal characteristics. Findings: There is a significant difference in the JCR impact measures of high-quality finance and management science journals versus high-quality information systems journals. However, only the JCR measures for finance journals correlate with a variety of journal-specific factors, including the journal's acceptance rate and frequency of issue. The SJR measures for finance and management science journals are, on the other hand, consistently higher than information systems journals, though the SJR value of any individual journal can be quite volatile. Most importantly, finance and management journals also report significant relations between the