Measuring the impact of accounting journals using Google Scholar and the g-index

Abstract

The UK's proposed Research Excellence Framework promotes a move towards citation analysis for assessing research performance. However, for business disciplines, journal rankings are likely to remain an important aid in evaluating research quality. The accounting literature includes many journal rankings and citation studies, however there has been little coverage of recent advances in these areas. This study explores approaches to assessing the impact of accounting journals with a focus on quantitative measures as a complement to peer-review-based evaluation. New data sources and techniques for citation studies are reviewed, and the g-index is selected for further analysis. The g-index was developed by Professor Leo Egghe in 2006 as an improvement on the h-index. Like the h-index, the g-index represents a relationship between papers published and the level of citations they receive, but the g-index is more sensitive to highly cited paper. To apply the g-index to accounting journals, the study first combines eight published journals rankings to produce a list of 34 highly-regarded titles. Citation data are then gathered from Google Scholar and used to calculate g-index scores as the basis of a new ranking. Google Scholar is found to have broader coverage of accounting citations than Scopus or the Web of Science databases, but requires cleaning to remove duplicate entries. The use of the g-index for ranking journals is found to be a useful innovation in citation analysis, allowing a more robust assessment of the impact of journals.