GRADING JOURNALS IN ECONOMICS: THE ABCS OF THE ABDC

Abstract

Many institutions and governments grade academic journals for the evaluation of research. In this paper, we implement a multi‐bibliometric methodology for the evaluation of such a list of journal grades. We examine the grades assigned by the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) for over 750 journals in the fields of economics and statistics. Firstly, we generate up to 48 bibliometric‐based grades for each journal based on the grade distribution implied by the ABDC. Secondly, we categorize the bibliometrics employing a cluster analysis of an interrater agreement statistic. Thirdly, we present a visualization of the consistency of the grading by journal. Finally, we list those journals where the majority of the matched bibliometrics indicate a higher or lower grade than their ABDC grade.

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“…88Other well‐known alternatives to the ABDC Journal Quality List include the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), the Web of Science Journal Impact Factor (JIF), SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), Google Scholar Journal Metrics, Financial Times (FT) 50 Journals, and Harzing Journal Quality List. A reason for using the ABDC ratings is that they are widely employed in business schools inside and outside Australia for the evaluation of the quality of research output (Hirschberg and Lye 2020) and there is evidence that the ratings do in fact measure the ‘quality’ of publications. Lan et al (2022) estimate a type of hedonic regression in which the number of citations a paper attracts is a function of the ABDC rating of the journal.…”