Ranking Finance Journals Using Author Affiliation Index

Abstract

In this paper we use a new method to rank finance journals. Traditionally, journal qualities are measured either by the citation-based impact factor approach, or by the survey method. Although these two approaches have merits, their efficacy is also limited in many ways. Author Affiliation Index is a cost-effective and intuitively easy to understand approach to journal rankings. We define Author Affiliation Index as the ratio of articles authored by faculties at the world's top 80 finance programs divided by the total number of articles by all authors. Forty-one finance journals are ranked according to this index. The effectiveness of the index is comparable to prior citation-based and survey-based studies. We find Author Affiliation Index, if properly constructed, provides an easy and credible way to supplement the existing journal ranking methods. Due to its easiness to construct, the index is particularly useful for junior faculty seeking the right journals to publish but is unable to justify the journal quality because these journals are not ranked in existing studies.

Based upon various definitions of the Author Affiliation Index, our findings indicate that Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Journal of Business unambiguously claim the top five spots in finance journal rankings. Some newer journals, such as Journal of Corporate Finance and Journal of Financial Markets, while ranked lower in the other studies, score impressively in our analysis. Compared with prior studies, our ranking is highly correlated with most of those journal rankings.

Keywords: Finance journal ranking, author affiliation index

JEL Classification: G00