Template-type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Chia-Lin Chang
Author-Email: changchialin@nchu.edu.tw
Author-Person: pch286 
Author-Workplace-Name: Department of Applied Economics, Department of Finance, National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan
Author-Name: Michael McAleer
Author-Person: pmc90 
Author-Workplace-Name: Econometric Institute, Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Tinbergen Institute,
	The Netherlands, Department of Quantitative Economics, Complutense University of Madrid, and Institute of
	Economic Research, Kyoto University. 
Title: What Do Experts Know About Forecasting Journal Quality? A Comparison with ISI Research Impact in Finance
Abstract: Experts possess knowledge and information that are not publicly available. The paper is concerned with 
	forecasting academic journal quality and research impact using a survey of international experts from a 
	national project on ranking academic finance journals in Taiwan. A comparison is made with publicly 
	available bibliometric data, namely the Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science citations database (hereafter ISI)
	for the Business - Finance (hereafter Finance) category. The paper analyses the leading international 
	journals in Finance using expert scores and quantifiable Research Assessment Measures (RAMs), and highlights 
	the similarities and differences in the expert scores and alternative RAMs, where the RAMs are based on 
	alternative transformations of citations taken from the ISI database. Alternative RAMs may be calculated 
	annually or updated daily to answer the perennial questions as to When, Where and How (frequently) published 
	papers are cited (see Chang et al. (2011a, b, c)). The RAMs include the most widely used RAM, namely the 
	classic 2-year impact factor including journal self citations (2YIF), 2-year impact factor excluding journal 
	self citations (2YIF*), 5-year impact factor including journal self citations (5YIF), Immediacy (or zero-year
	impact factor (0YIF)), Eigenfactor, Article Influence, C3PO (Citation Performance Per Paper Online), h-index, 
	PI-BETA (Papers Ignored - By Even The Authors), 2-year Self-citation Threshold Approval Ratings (2Y-STAR), 
	Historical Self-citation Threshold Approval Ratings (H-STAR), Impact Factor Inflation (IFI), and Cited 
	Article Influence (CAI). As data are not available for 5YIF, Article Influence and CAI for 13 of the leading 
	34 journals considered, 10 RAMs are analysed for 21 highly-cited journals in Finance. The harmonic mean of 
	the ranks of the 10 RAMs for the 34 highly-cited journals are also presented. It is shown that emphasizing 
	the 2-year impact factor of a journal, which partly answers the question as to When published papers are 
	cited, to the exclusion of other informative RAMs, which answer Where and How (frequently) published papers 
	are cited, can lead to a distorted evaluation of journal impact and influence relative to the Harmonic Mean 
	rankings. A linear regression model is used to forecast expert scores on the basis of RAMs that capture 
	journal impact, journal policy, the number of high quality papers, and quantitative information about a 
	journal. The robustness of the rankings is also analysed.
Classification-JEL: C18, C81, C83.
Keywords: Expert scores, Journal quality, RAMs, Impact factor, IFI, C3PO, PI-BETA, STAR, Eigenfactor, Article Influence, 
	h-index, harmonic mean, robustness.
Note: The authors are grateful to Shing-yang Hu (National Taiwan University) for providing the data on Expert 
	Scores. For financial support, the first author wishes to thank the National Science Council, Taiwan, and 
	the second author wishes to acknowledge the Australian Research Council, National Science Council, Taiwan, 
	and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. 
Length: 43 pages 
Creation-Date: 2013
Revision-Date: 2013-02 
Number: 2013-09 
X-File-Ref: http://america.sim.ucm.es/repec/ucm/ref/doicae1309.txt
File-URL: https://eprints.ucm.es/id/eprint/19970/1/1309.pdf
File-Format: Application/pdf
Handle: RePEc:ucm:doicae:1309