Guest editorial
Article Type: Guest editorial From: Managerial Finance, Volume 42, Issue 4.
Special issue on journal rankings, measurement of intellectual contributions, and related topics
It is my pleasure to be a guest editor for the special issue on “Journal rankings, measurement of intellectual contributions,and related topics” in Managerial Finance. To the best of my knowledge, this is the very first special issue on this topic in any major finance journals. I sincerely thank Professor Don Johnson for his insights and leadership.
Journal rankings offer important information for faculty, administrators, students, and other constituents. The history on the subject is long. Measurement of intellectual contributions allows constituents to gauge their research performance and thus provides guidance for future intellectual development. In this issue, we have nine different papers range from literature reviews, new journal ranking methods, journal influence analysis with respect to corporate finance research, and accounting education trends.
The invited paper by Chan, Fung, Fung, and Yau entitled “The ranking of institutions and academic journals: a selective review and a conceptual framework” provides a selective review of literature that focusses on the very early literature and offers a bold attempt to layout a conceptual foundation of ranking of academic institutions and journals. They propose a context-based ranking framework to analyze rankings as one of the factors that influence the environment and they ultimately affect the usefulness of these rankings. It also implies that ranking of a journal or institution is a relative measure, as the context in which rankings are derived may change over time. Ultimately, the relative benchmarks used in the rankings will change and lead to more and newer relevant measurement metrics. This is a first attempt in the literature to discuss some theoretical framework on the subject. The second paper by Professors Guo, Wang, Qiao, and Liu, entitled “A review of studies on citations and journal ranking in finance,” conduct a literature review on studies in citations and journal ranking in finance. Both this and the first article discuss the literature and guide readers on what has been done in this research area.
After the literature review papers, we have several papers that examine new methods in evaluating journals with specific focus in finance. The new methods include: stochastic dominance (by Professors Kao, Hsu, Lu, and Fung), quality weighted citations(by Professors Chang and McAleer), and a research portfolio approach by (Professor Danielson and Heck). These papers yield interesting findings and they represent new developments in journal ranking metrics with focus on finance.
The next four articles provide several miscellaneous studies, which are interesting and fit our special issue. Professors Lee and Wei’s article entitled “Journal features and impact factor” examine the relation between journal features and their respective impact factors. Professors Chan, Wong, and Wong analyze the journals that are often neglected in the journal ranking literature. They report that these journals, while not widely cited, have a substantial number and percentage of authors from US colleges and about 92 percent of them are from AACSB accredited schools and most of them are from AACSB accredited schools with doctoral programs. Professor Borokhovish, Lee, and Simkins examine specific journals that influence corporate finance research. Finally, Professors Bernardi, Delande, and Zamojcin present a comprehensive analysis of accounting education research among authors in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and UK.
Kam C. Chan
Department of Finance, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA
