Problems in Using the Social Sciences Citation Index to Rank Economics Journals

Abstract

Liebowitz and Palmer (1984) and Laband and Piette (June 1994), in two influential studies, have used the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) Journal Citation Reports to rank economics jour nals, and measure their relative impact over time. One motivation for doing so is to assess the chang ing academic journal market in economics. Laband and Piette thus report journal rankings for 1970, 1980, and 1990 by impact-adjusted citations per article?the iterative weighting procedure devel oped by Liebowitz and Palmer to capture the rela tive importance of citations in terms of the rank position of the citing journal. They then reason that the changes in the distribution of citations across journals, and associated changes in journal ranks, is the academic community's version of changes in dollar voting by consumers across commodities. A second motivation recognized by Laband and Piette in their study concerned a subsequent use of the Liebowitz and Palmer study: their 1980 journal rankings have been used at many colleges and uni versities to help evaluate individual scholar's pro ductivity, in order to determine salary increases and make tenure and promotion recommendations. Rather than count the number of publications from 'core' journals an individual had accumulated,1 the value of their scholarship might better be deter mined as a weighted sum, where publications in high ranked journals possessed larger weights. This paper comments on two problems involved in ranking all economics journals according to a single index using SSCI data. One is conceptual in nature, and will be familiar to economists acquainted with index number problems. The other is technical, and pertains to using the SSCI data as a source of information to determine the relative impact of economics journals. The view taken in this paper is that these problems indicate the need for considerable caution in using the existing jour nal rankings to evaluate scholarly productivity and evaluate economics departments. These problems, however, need not bring into question the industrial organization interpretation the studies considered here adopt toward the economics journals market, and indeed point toward interesting extensions of some of the conclusions reached by Laband and Piette.