 Ranking Journal Quality by Harmonic Mean of Ranks: An Application to ISI Statistics & ProbabilityChia-Lin Chang () and Michael McAleer Working Papers in Economics from University of Canterbury, Department of Economics and Finance Abstract: As the preponderance of journal rankings becomes increasingly more frequent and prominent in academic decision making, such rankings in broad discipline categories is tak-ing on an increasingly important role. The paper focuses on the robustness of rankings of academic journal quality and research impact using on the widely-used Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science citations database (ISI) for the Statistics & Probability category. The paper analyses 110 ISI international journals in Statistics & Probability using quantifiable Research Assessment Measures (RAMs), and highlights the similarities and differences in various RAMs, which are based on alternative transformations of citations and influence. Alternative RAMs may be calculated annually or updated daily to determine When, Where and How (fre-quently) published papers are cited (see Chang et al. (2011a, b, c), Chang et al. (2012)). The RAMs are grouped in four distinct classes that include impact factor, mean citations and non-citations, journal policy, number of high quality papers, and journal influence and article in-fluence. These classes include the most widely used RAMs, namely the classic 2-year impact factor including journal self-citations (2YIF), 2-year impact factor excluding journal self-citations (2YIF*), 5-year impact factor including journal self-citations (5YIF), Eigenfactor (or Journal Influence), Article Influence, h-index, PI-BETA (Papers Ignored - By Even The Authors), 5YD2 (= 5YIF/2YIF) as a measure of citations longevity, and Escalating Self Cita-tions (ESC) as a measure of increasing journal self-citations. The paper highlights robust rankings based on the harmonic mean of the ranks of RAMs across the 4 classes. We show that focusing solely on the 2-year impact factor (2YIF) of a journal, which partly answers the question as to When published papers are cited, to the exclusion of other informative RAMs, which answer Where and How (frequently) published papers are cited, can distort the evalua-tion of journal quality, impact and influence, relative to the more robust harmonic mean of the ranks. Keywords: Research assessment measures; impact factor; IFI; C3PO; PI-BETA; STAR; Eigenfactor; Article Influence; h-index; 5YD2; ESC; harmonic mean of the ranks; Statistics & Probability; robust journal rankings (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cbt:econwp:12/11 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Canterbury, Department of Economics and Finance Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand. Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.