The “celebrities” in finance: a citation analysis of finance journals

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the ten highly ranked journals in finance, and identify the most published authors, most cited articles, top publishing countries, top publishing universities, top publication years and the most discussed topics using keywords. Design/methodology/approach - Using the services of the Web of Science™ (WoS), all the available data about each journal’s published articles were extracted. A total of 6,029 articles containing 23,521 keywords and 208,905 cited references were analysed. Findings - Results indicate that Viscusi, Chemmanur and Statman are the most published authors. The most cited article is Fama and French’s (1993) article – Common risk factors in the returns on stocks and bonds – with 522 citations. The most cited author is Eugene Fama with 2,848 citations followed by Michael Jensen with 1,367 citations. USA and England contributed more articles than any other country, where US University of California System ranked first. “Information”, “risk” and “market” were the most discussed topics. Findings from this study reveal not only the popular authors, articles and topics in the scholarly finance literature, but also the lesser-known areas of research, which may need attention. Originality/value - It is the first large-scale citation analysis study of its kind, representing data from 178 years of combined publication history.