Ranking of Sustainability Journals Using the Author Affiliation Index and Comparison to Other Journal Metrics

Matías Ginieis and Xiaoni Li
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Matías Ginieis: Department of Business Management, Faculty of Business and Economics, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 43204 Reus, Tarragona, Spain
Xiaoni Li: Department of Business Management, Faculty of Business and Economics, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 43204 Reus, Tarragona, Spain

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 3, 1-18

Abstract: An important component in evaluating research productivity is the quality of the academic journal. For this reason, the objective of this paper is to analyze the Author Affiliation Index (AAI) in sustainability field journals as a preliminary study to offer some insights into quality rating of journals in this chosen discipline. The AAI of a journal is defined as the percentage of the journal’s articles published by authors affiliated with a base set of high-quality academic universities or institutions. We conducted an evaluation of the top 50 journals in environmental studies indexed in the category Social Science in the Web of Science (WOS) database in 2018 and the top-notch 50 universities worldwide with master or postgraduate programs in the disciplines of management and sustainability studies. The results obtained demonstrate that there is a low AAI score on average in the sustainability field compared with other disciplines and the potential reason for such low scoring is probably caused by the high number of co-authors collaborating in environmental studies related journals. Although there is no agreement reached in terms of journal ratings by AAIs and other citation and survey-based measures, we can confirm certain elite affiliations effect which leading sustainability journals have higher concentrations of authors who are affiliated with elite institutions, however, such elite affiliation effect is on average much lower compared with other disciplines as finance, accounting or transportation, etc.

Keywords: sustainability; journal ranking; author affiliation; research productivity; authorship pattern; journal quality; environmental research; higher education; university (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:3:p:1104-:d:316284

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