Publish Where It Counts: Publication Choices and Review-Panellist Networks

Discrete journal ranking lists treat journals within a tier as equivalent, creating scope for substitution toward outlets of lower measured quality at the bottom of each tier. Using 1.25 million articles across 1,123 economics and finance journals in the Australian ABDC Journal Quality List over 2005-2024, we study both how academics respond to the list and whether its tier revisions are independent of review panellists' publication networks. After the list's introduction, Australian academic authors shift toward lower-quality journals within the top tiers: a one-standard-deviation decline in pre-treatment within-tier Article Influence score predicts a 0.48 percentage point rise in academic author share at A* (11% of the tier's 4.2% mean), with a similar effect at A and none at B. A triple-difference design using non-academic Australian researchers as a within-journal comparison group locates this gradient among academics and near zero among non-academics, and event studies around individual tier revisions show academic-specific responses to downgrades and, more weakly, to upgrades. Finally, we bring the review panellists' own publication records into the analysis of the tier decisions they make: journals connected to economics and finance panellists through their publications are 13 percentage points more likely to be upgraded, after conditioning on observed quality and relative to placebo panels matched on field and journal-network exposure. We read this last result as descriptive of the review process: it is entangled with panellists' publication networks, but the design cannot establish whether this reflects influence or superior information.