Abstract
We examine the impact of a journal's ranking on the citations its papers garner. Our testbed is journals included in the early annual publications of the Academic Journal Guide, published by the Association of Business Schools from 2007 to 2010. By focusing on a small subset of these journals, we provide causal evidence that an increase in a journal's ranking will increase citations to its papers. We argue that this increase can be attributed to (i) more authors learning about and viewing these outlets and their publications and (ii) researchers signalling their paper's own impact by citing highly ranked journals. We find some evidence for the former, though not robust, and substantial evidence for the latter. Given that signalling is deliberate and associated with incentives to publish in highly ranked journals, we decompose this channel by citing researchers’ characteristics. Except for senior academics, all types of researchers are consistent with signalling. The policy implications of our results relate to the pervasive use of journal rankings and recent initiatives to evaluate research.
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