IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ecinqu/v52y2014i4p1301-1314.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Ranking Law Journals And The Limits Of Journal Citation Reports

Author

Listed:
  • THEODORE EISENBERG
  • MARTIN T. WELLS

Abstract

type="main" xml:id="ecin12133-abs-0001"> Journal rankings published by Journal Citation Reports (JCR) are widely used to assess research quality, which influences important decisions by academic departments, universities, and countries in the allocation of research funds. We study refereed law journal rankings by JCR and Washington and Lee Law Library (W&L). JCR's rankings are uncorrelated with W&L's. The differences appear to be attributable to underrepresentation of law journals in JCR's database. We illustrate the effects of database bias on rankings through case studies of three elite journals, the Journal of Law and Economics, Supreme Court Review, and the American Law and Economics Review. (JEL C18, C81, Y10)

Suggested Citation

  • Theodore Eisenberg & Martin T. Wells, 2014. "Ranking Law Journals And The Limits Of Journal Citation Reports," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 52(4), pages 1301-1314, October.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:ecinqu:v:52:y:2014:i:4:p:1301-1314
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/ecin.2014.52.issue-4
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Philip M. Davis, 2008. "Eigenfactor: Does the principle of repeated improvement result in better estimates than raw citation counts?," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 59(13), pages 2186-2188, November.
    2. Currie, Russell R. & Pandher, Gurupdesh S., 2011. "Finance journal rankings and tiers: An Active Scholar Assessment methodology," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 7-20, January.
    3. Yong Bao & Melody Lo & Franklin G. Mixon, 2010. "General-interest versus specialty journals: Using intellectual influence of econometrics research to rank economics journals and articles," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 25(2), pages 345-353.
    4. Imad Moosa, 2011. "The demise of the ARC journal ranking scheme: an ex post analysis of the accounting and finance journals," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 51(3), pages 809-836, September.
    5. Jevin West & Theodore Bergstrom & Carl T. Bergstrom, 2010. "Big Macs and Eigenfactor scores: Don't let correlation coefficients fool you," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 61(9), pages 1800-1807, September.
    6. Eisenberg, Theodore & Wells, Martin T, 1998. "Ranking and Explaining the Scholarly Impact of Law Schools," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 27(2), pages 373-413, June.
    7. Christoph Neuhaus & Werner Marx & Hans‐Dieter Daniel, 2009. "The publication and citation impact profiles of Angewandte Chemie and the Journal of the American Chemical Society based on the sections of Chemical Abstracts: A case study on the limitations of the J," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 60(1), pages 176-183, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mu-hsuan Huang & Wang-Ching Shaw & Chi-Shiou Lin, 2019. "One category, two communities: subfield differences in “Information Science and Library Science” in Journal Citation Reports," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(2), pages 1059-1079, May.
    2. M. Ryan Haley & M. Kevin McGee, 2023. "A flexible functional method for jointly valuing journal visibility and author citation count," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(6), pages 3337-3346, June.
    3. Haley, M. Ryan & McGee, M. Kevin, 2020. "Jointly valuing journal visibility and author citation count: An axiomatic approach," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(1).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Walters, William H., 2014. "Do Article Influence scores overestimate the citation impact of social science journals in subfields that are related to higher-impact natural science disciplines?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(2), pages 421-430.
    2. Mingers, John & Yang, Liying, 2017. "Evaluating journal quality: A review of journal citation indicators and ranking in business and management," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 257(1), pages 323-337.
    3. Wohlrabe, Klaus, 2016. "Taking the Temperature: A Meta-Ranking of Economics Journals," MPRA Paper 68933, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Mingers, John & Leydesdorff, Loet, 2015. "A review of theory and practice in scientometrics," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 246(1), pages 1-19.
    5. Waltman, Ludo, 2016. "A review of the literature on citation impact indicators," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 365-391.
    6. Enrico Miersch, 2020. "Research Evaluation of Financial Research - Evidence from a Survey," Credit and Capital Markets, Credit and Capital Markets, vol. 53(3), pages 383-419.
    7. Chan, Kam C. & Chang, Chih-Hsiang & Chang, Yuanchen, 2013. "Ranking of finance journals: Some Google Scholar citation perspectives," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 21(C), pages 241-250.
    8. Kerl, Alexander & Miersch, Enrico & Walter, Andreas, 2018. "Evaluation of academic finance conferences," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 89(C), pages 26-38.
    9. Domingo Docampo & Vicente Safón, 2021. "Journal ratings: a paper affiliation methodology," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(9), pages 8063-8090, September.
    10. Lutz Bornmann & Alexander Butz & Klaus Wohlrabe, 2018. "What are the top five journals in economics? A new meta-ranking," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 50(6), pages 659-675, February.
    11. Claudio Vitari, 2014. "Electronic currencies for purposive degrowth?," Working paper serie RMT - Grenoble Ecole de Management hal-00975432, HAL.
    12. Nicholas McGuigan, 2015. "The Impact of Journal Rankings on Australasian Accounting Education Scholarship - A Personal View," Accounting Education, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 24(3), pages 187-207, June.
    13. Chia-Lin Chang & Michael McAleer & Les Oxley, 2010. "Journal Impact Factor Versus Eigenfactor and Article Influence," KIER Working Papers 737, Kyoto University, Institute of Economic Research.
    14. Matthias Weber, 2016. "The Effects of Listing Authors in Alphabetical Order: A survey of the Empirical Evidence," Bank of Lithuania Occasional Paper Series 12, Bank of Lithuania.
    15. Chia-Lin Chang & Michael McAleer & Les Oxley, 2012. "Journal Impact Factor, Eigenfactor, Journal Influence and Article Influence," KIER Working Papers 822, Kyoto University, Institute of Economic Research.
    16. Jerome K. Vanclay, 2012. "Impact factor: outdated artefact or stepping-stone to journal certification?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 92(2), pages 211-238, August.
    17. Hagendorf, Klaus, 2011. "Crowding out capitalism: A law of historical materialism," MPRA Paper 31745, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    18. Yuanyuan Liu & Qiang Wu & Shijie Wu & Yong Gao, 2021. "Weighted citation based on ranking-related contribution: a new index for evaluating article impact," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(10), pages 8653-8672, October.
    19. Antonio García-Romero & Daniel Santín & Gabriela Sicilia, 2016. "Another brick in the wall: a new ranking of academic journals in Economics using FDH," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 107(1), pages 91-101, April.
    20. Mutz, Rüdiger & Daniel, Hans-Dieter, 2012. "Skewed citation distributions and bias factors: Solutions to two core problems with the journal impact factor," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 6(2), pages 169-176.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • O31 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives
    • C15 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Statistical Simulation Methods: General
    • D02 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Institutions: Design, Formation, Operations, and Impact
    • L89 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Other

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:ecinqu:v:52:y:2014:i:4:p:1301-1314. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/weaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.