Most Prolific Authors in the Finance Literature: 1959-2008

Abstract

This paper presents an update of an earlier paper published in the Journal of Finance Literature [Cooley and Heck, 2005] that ranked authors over an earlier 50-year period. There is a remarkable group of prolific authors detailed in this study update: included are 977 prolific authors with 6 or more appearances in seven leading finance journals and 983 prolific authors with 10 or more appearances in 26 core finance journals. These authors demonstrate great durability in navigating the vagaries of referees and the demands of editors. They represent a small minority of thousands of authors during the period 1959 to 2008. Besides satisfying a natural curiosity of who the prolific authors are, examination of extreme performance provides perspective on research productivity in finance, as do the reported distributional statistics. The findings help in the formation of realistic expectations about scholarly work.