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Which journal ranking list? A case
study in business and economics
Rayana Jaafar
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Vijay Pereira
Khalifa University of Science and Technology, Abu Dhabi, UAE, and
Samer S. Saab and Abdul-Nasser El-Kassar
Lebanese American University, Beirut, Lebanon
Abstract
Purpose –With over 3,000 acade mic journals in the fields of Business and Economics, most acade mics face a
hard time selecting an ade quate journal to submit their work to. In today’s dema nding academic environment
and with the presence of different journal ranking lists (JRLs), the selection becomes more difficult when
considering employment, promotion and funding. The purpose of this paper is to explore key differences
among multiple JRLs pertinent to the latter common objectives. An extensive analysis is conducted to
compare the content of journals in the Austra lian Business Deans Council (ABDC) Journal Quality list, Scopus
and Web of Science (WoS) in the fields of Business and Economics. Then, a case of a university with medium
research output is considered where scholarly performance evaluation is based on the ABDC Journal
Quality List.
Design/methodology/approach –After ranking jour nals in the fields of Business a nd Economics based on
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator, JCR’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and JCR’s Eigenfactor (EF), a
methodology is proposed to categorize journals in the three JRLs into the same categorization adopted by
ABDC. The latter establishes a way to compare the four JRLs under consideration and serves as a basis to
compare and analyze the content of journals in the ABDC Journal Quality list, Scopus and WoS. As a proxy
impact metric, a normalized citation count is associated with each article based on Google Scholar. The
publications of the considered university are then evaluated from the perspective of the four JRLs in terms
of citation-based impact and quality while considering the exposure to popular world university ranking
tables.
Findings –For journals classified under fourth tier by ABDC, over 53 and 59% are not indexed by Scopus and
WoS, respectively. In this case study, over 42% of the publications appear in journals that are not listed in JCR
despite the fact that over 94% of them are listed by the SJR list. Generally, publications that appear in journals
listed by JCR achieve, on a yearly average, significantly higher citation rates when compared to those that
appear in journals listed in ABDC and SJR Lists.
Originality/value –A four-tier mapping is proposed for consistent comparison among JRLs. Normalized
citation count associated with each article based on Google Scholar is employed for evaluation. The findings
provide recommendations for scholars, administrators and global universities, including Euro-Med
Universities, on which JRL can be more influential for both faculty development and positioning of the
university.
Keywords Bibliometrics, Journal rankings, Academic journals, ABDC List, University rankings, Journal
Impact Factor
Paper type Case study
1. Introduction
In the past few decades, academic institutions have been heavily relying on evaluations of
scholarly output in an attempt to assess faculty, staff members and entire departments. The
latter arises from the need to quantify the academic performance of different institutional
entities (Mckinnon, 2013). As a result, scholarly evaluation became a cornerstone in critical
processes involving faculty recruitment, promotions, post-tenure review and yearly merit
increase (Vel et al., 2019). Originally structured to provide oriented services to researchers,
bibliometrics are nowadays used as one of the essential tools for quality assessment and
decision-making. Despite the variety in performance measures, the practice of publishing in
Which journal
ranking list?
361
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/1450-2194.htm
Received 3 May 2020
Revised 4 July 2020
Accepted 22 July 2020
EuroMed Journal of Business
Vol. 16 No. 4, 2021
pp. 361-380
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1450-2194
DOI 10.1108/EMJB-05-2020-0039
top quality journals have become a golden rule in the majority of disciplines (Truex et al.,
2011). In the presence of different methodologies for assessment and ranking of publication
venues, the everlasting race to develop the most “accurate”journal ranking list (JRL) has
begun (Sangster, 2015). Nowadays, different universities adopt different JRLs as multiple
international and well-recognized lists are publicly available. Through the latter practice,
JRLs play an important role in shaping the nature, quality, impact and structure of scholarly
works (Mingers and Willmott, 2013). Hence, the importance of adopting appropriate and
suitable JRL cannot be underrated as it sets institutional changes in motion.
In general, the process of ranking academic journals can be classified into two main
approaches: peer review and quality indicators (Mingers and Harzing, 2007). In a peer review
approach, the ranking process becomes subjective as members of certain academic
communities are invited to rank the journals based on their own evaluations and judgments
(Morris et al., 2009). Perhaps the most relevant example is the Australian Business Deans
Council (ABDC) Journal Quality List, which ranks journals in all Business and Economics
disciplines. In contrast, quality indicators depend on quantitative performance metrics that
relate to the publication behavior of a journal like the number of published articles and the
citation metrics extracted from appropriate citation databases such as Clarivate Analytics’
Web of Science (WoS), Elsevier’s Scopus and Google’s Google Scholar. As an example of the
latter, Clarivate Analytics’Journal Citation Reports (JCR) offers the ability to rank listed
journals based on multiple indicators such as the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and the
Eigenfactor (EF). Similarly, journals indexed by Scopus can be listed by means of their
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator.
The ability to rank journals based on multiple approaches and indicators renders the
process extremely critical and delicate, especially in fields where large discrepancies arise
between multiple international journal lists. One fundamental problem arises when the
International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (IEMJ) is considered. Based on
ABDC List, IEMJ is listed as a fourth-tier (Category C) journal. Based on SJR, Scopus lists
IEMJ as a first-quartile journal (Category Q1). The issue becomes even more relevant as
Clarivate Analytics’JCR lists IEMJ as a second-quartile journal (Category Q2) based on JIF. In
the presence of such discrepancies in ranking journals in the Business field, like others, and
the inability to identify the most “valid”JRL, one can only wonder about the consequences of
adopting a JRL over another. In this work, we aim to address the latter issues by exploring
key differences among four JRLs, namely based on SJR, JIF, EF and the ABDC List. The
comparison is conducted through an extensive analysis of the publication behavior of a
Business School with medium research output and whose scholarly performance evaluation
is based on the ABDC Journal Quality List. In addition, we study the citation trends of the
school’s publications using a proxy impact metric, a normalized citation count for articles
based on Google Scholar. The latter analysis provides an indication of the level of exposure
achieved by journals listed in each of the three JRLs.
2. Research objectives and related work
To address the issues of identifying the most “valid”JRL and the consequences of adopting a
JRL over another, one must consider three main factors. First, it all begins with the need to
assess the performance of researchers and academics. The process of evaluating publication
records has become so relative to the indicator under consideration to the point where a
unique and absolute evaluation is not always attainable. A recent survey across 129 research-
oriented institutions in Canada and US has concluded that almost half of the considered
institutions depend on JIF in matters related to faculty promotions (McKiernan et al., 2019).
The dependence on the JIF as a main performance measure has granted this indicator an
oversized power and influence on the advancement of scientific careers (Berenbaum, 2019).
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As a result, academic work opportunities became highly dependent on proven research
achievements measured through the number of publications in high-impact journals and
their corresponding citations (Herman and Nicholas, 2019).
Second, with different JRLs adopting different performance indicators, the publication
strategy of an institution may not coincide with the welfare of its constituents. For instance,
a study comparing the performance metrics of selected journals in Business and
Management found samples of journals that performed well in terms of citations but that
were ranked relatively low (Mingers and Yang, 2017). It follows that researchers whose
publication behavior is guided by a specific JRL, possibly adopted by their hiring institution,
may avoid publishing in journals that would otherwise provide good exposure to the
published work. The echoes of adopting a specific JRL, however, are not limited to the
careers of scientists as institutions may unintentionally suffer when citations come into play.
Foremost, institutions are always after publishing their scholarly outputs in journals of
high-impact as a means to reach a wider audience in the scientific community, where the
latter may be reflected by gathering more citations. However, the practice of depending on
certain performance indicators to estimate the future impact of a scholarly output is often
questionable. A Nature editorial published in 2005 revealed that 89% of the 2004 citations
attributed to Nature papers published in 2002 and 2003 were only generated by 25% of these
papers (“Not-so-deep impact.”,2005). The remaining papers received about 10% of the year’s
citations. Thus, the expected citation-impact depends on the journal and the published work
itself.
Finally, university ranking is perhaps the most important yet complicated factor that sets
the very fine limits among institutions (Rindova et al., 2018). Different university ranking
agencies adopt different citation databases to assess the performance of universities through
measures related to citations as well as the number and quality of an institution’s scholarly
output. For example, Times Higher Education and QS World University Rankings both adopt
Scopus. In the same way, CWTS Leiden Rankings, US World News and Reports, and
Shanghai Rankings adopt WoS and hence only consider publications that appear in journals
listed by the WoS database. A detailed study on the scholarly output of two Portuguese
universities concluded that, out of the total documents referenced by Scopus and not by WoS,
around 25–40% appeared in journals with good citation records (Vieira and Gomes, 2009). It
follows that choosing the appropriate publication strategy, such as JRLs and citation
databases, could have serious consequences on the ranking and reputation of the institution
itself.
Accordingly, the research questions guiding this study can be formulated as follows:
RQ1. Which JRL is the most objective and indicative in terms of journal exposure, quality
and citations?
RQ2. If the publication behavior of an institution is guided and driven by a specific JRL, is
it possible that the institution is unintentionally harming the publication profile and
academic career of its researchers through the latter practice?
Based on 1,238 selected journals from the 2016 ABDC List, a study concluded that the top five
journals in terms of their SJR values are not all listed as first tier (Category A*) by ABDC; and
in fact, one is listed as a fourth tier (Category C) (Moosa, 2016). In (Zainuba and Rahal, 2015), a
detailed analysis of 181 selected journals from the 2013 ABDC List ranks the journals based
on their corresponding SJR and JIF values, respectively. The study concluded that the SJR
confirms better to the categorization of the journals by ABDC List when compared to the JIF.
While the literature is swamped with studies highlighting the differences between the ABDC
List and other JRLs that are based on quantitative indicators, to the best of the authors’
knowledge, none of the studies have explored the consequences of adopting one JRL over
Which journal
ranking list?
363
another for an institution and its academics. The discussed topic provides a novel insight on
the negative effects of abiding by one JRL for all purposes in the fields of Business and
Economics. In addition, this work provides recommendations on which journal ranking
list (JRL) can be more influential for both faculty development and positioning of the
university.
3. Methodology
In this paper, we attempt to answer the research questions by providing a rigorous analysis of
the publication behavior of the Adnan Kassar School of Business (AKSOB) at the Lebanese
American University (LAU). Much like any other institution, LAU depends on evaluations of
scholarly output to act on matters related to faculty recruitment, promotions and yearly merit
increase. In AKSOB, the norm is to publish in journals that are listed by the ABDC JRL. Hence,
faculty members and students are encouraged to publish in journals with high ABDC
ranking. In order to evaluate the impact of the latter publication strategy, we consider three
other JRLs based on three citation-based indicators: SJR, JIF and EF. We analyze the
publication behavior of AKSOB with respect to each considered list and reflect on the impact
of adopting the ABDC List over others. For consistent comparison, and since ABDC lists
journals in the general fields of Business and Economics, the journals of the three other
considered lists will be limited to the same fields.
3.1 Data extracted from the ABDC journal quality list
Established in 2007 by the Australian Business Deans Council, the ABDC Journal Quality
List aims to overcome the bias commonly found in other international ranking lists. The most
recent ABDC list was established in 2019 and includes eight review panels. The ABDC list
classifies journals based on four mutually exclusive categories, namely, A*, A, B and C with
A* representing the highest quality journals and C denoting the lowest quality journals. Out
of 2,684 titles, the ABDC list identifies 199 (7.41%) as A*, 650 (24.22%) journals A, 851
(31.71%) as B, and 984 (36.66%) as C. The ABDC List has been criticized for its subjectivity
inherited through the evaluation of journals by means of research assessment committees
(Moosa, 2016). In addition, the process of classifying journals into categories eliminates the
ability to make fine distinction between multiple journals belonging to the same category.
3.2 Data extracted from journal citation reports
Clarivate Analytics’JCR provides quality indicators, metrics and analysis of the most
impactful journals listed by parts of the WoS Core Collection (Ardito et al., 2018). JCR offers
multiple indicators to classify journals, including JIF and EF. JIF is composed of two parts:
The numerator is the number of citations in the current year of all items published in a
journal in the last two years and the denominator represents the number of articles published
in the last two years for the same journal (Bollen et al.,2009). The JIF has been previously
criticized as certain practices can be used to artificially inflate the metric. For example,
editors could encourage future authors to cite articles previously published in the journal to
which they are submitting their work (Brown, 2011). The EF is thought to overcome some of
these issues as the metric considers the number of citations for a given journal and assigns
weights based on the impact of the citing journal. Also, the EF is not influenced by self-
citations in the way JIF could be (Bergstrom, 2007). In this study, we consider two JRLs
associated with JCR data for our analysis, namely JIF list and EF list. In particular, after
including all the JCR journals in the fields of Business and Economics (888 titles), we rank the
journals based on JIF indicator to build the JCR JIF list and then again based on the EF to
subsequently build the JCR EF list.
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3.3 Data extracted from SCImago journal rank
The SJR is an open-access portal that provides scientific indicators and metric for Scopus-
listed journals. The metrics and indicators can be used to analyze, evaluate and compare
journals in multiple disciplines. Currently, SCImago offers 27 major subject areas with up to
313 specific subject categories (Hall, 2011). SCImago provides multiple indicators, with SJR
being one of the most important. SJR uses a window of three years and expresses the
weighted citations received in a selected year by documents published in the journal in the
past three years. To minimize the ability to artificially inflate a journal’s impact through
excessive self-citation, SJR restricts the latter to certain percentages (Mingers and Yang,
2017). Using the same approach detailed earlier, we build the corresponding SJR list, which
includes journals based on the SJR performance metric and comprises a total of 2,029 titles.
3.4 Comparison of content and coverage
In order to provide a fair comparison among the four lists under consideration and to conduct
the case study analysis by quantifying the quality of AKSOB’s scholarly output based on the
classifications of the four JRLs, a method of classifying the journals of the JCR and SJR lists
into the same categorization adopted by ABDC is proposed. For the JIF list, the first 7.41% of
the journals are classified as category A*, the next 24.22% of the journals as category A, the
following 31.71% of the journals as category B and the remaining journals are classified as
category C. Although the aim is to keep the percentage of journals in each of the four
categories similar to the ones in the 2019 ABDC List, journals having the same JIF value are
given the same categorization. In particular, if journals X and Y have the same JIF values and
X is classified as category A whereas Y is classified as category B, we classify both journals
as category A. For our purposes, the latter case occurs rarely and does not impact the
percentage of journals in each category in any significant way. The same approach is adopted
for the JCR EF and the SJR lists. In what follows, we limit the analysis to all journals listed by
the 2019 ABDC List and we cross-list them with journals indexed by Scopus, WoS and JCR.
The results are shown in Table 1.
Based on the results above, we conclude the following:
(1) In total, Scopus and WoS index 70 and 67% of the journals listed by ABDC,
respectively. However, over 73% of ABDC journals are not indexed by JCR.
(2) Although both Scopus and WoS index most of ABDC’s A* journals, a closer look at
some of these journals reveals a different perspective. For example, the European
Journal of Marketing, classified as A* by ABDC, is listed as a third-tier journal
(Category Q3) in WoS, based on JIF. Thus, journals classified as high-quality by
ABDC should not be taken for granted. It seems that double-checking the
classification of a selected journal with different databases can be insightful,
especially when researchers are after journals of high-impact.
(3) For ABDC journals of category C, over 53 and 59% are not indexed by Scopus and
WoS, respectively. Furthermore, almost none of these journals are indexed by the JCR
ABDC list category Scopus WoS JCR
A*(199) 188 187 131
A(650) 578 582 302
B(851) 664 626 218
C(984) 457 395 70
Total 1887 1790 721
Table 1.
ABDC Journals listed
by Scopus, WoS
and JCR
Which journal
ranking list?
365
list which includes only a little over 7% of ABDC’s category C journals. These results
suggest that researchers should be very careful when selecting journals from
categorization C in ABDC as a significant portion of these journals will not appear in
Scopus and WoS databases. In addition, researchers who are after prestigious
journals indexed by JCR should try to avoid selecting those journals. Generally, for
medium to low quality journals, the content provided by the ABDC list for such
requirements is not recommended.
4. Case study results: analysis of LAU AKSOB publication trend
In this section, an exhaustive analysis of the publication behavior of AKSOB with respect to
the four lists under consideration is performed. In particular, we select 152 representative
journal publications between 2016 and 2020 with the following composition: 14.47% are
published in 2016, 21% in 2017, 23% in 2018, 26.32% in 2019 and 15.13% in 2020 [1]. The
publications range over multiple subfields in the general area of Business and Economics.
Each publication is classified by the publishing journal based on the equivalent
ABDC classification of the four JRLs under consideration. Figure 1 depicts a summary of
the results.
By observing Figure 1, one can identify two fundamental problems that arise when
different JRLs are considered. At a first glance, the publication output of AKSOB seems to
follow a normal trend, that is, publications appear in journals of high to medium quality. In
particular, based on the SJR and ABDC Lists, most of the listed scholarly outputs of AKSOB
are published in journals classified as A (58 and 44%) and B (37 and 42%) whereas very few
publications appear in journals classified as being lowest quality (3 and 8%). In addition, the
total percentage of AKSOB publications that appear in journals not listed by SJR is only 6.6%.
However, the analysis of AKSOB’s output using JCR lists shows a different trend since 42.1%
of AKSOB’s publications are not listed. In addition, the JCR JIF and JCR EF lists show that a
significant percentage of the publications appear in journals classified as lower quality (23
and 26%). In fact, the JCR lists show that over 60% of AKSOB’s articles are published in
journals that are classified under categories B and C. As JCR lists some of the most influential
journals in their respective fields, our results suggest that over 40% of AKSOB’s publications
may not benefit from the exposure otherwise achieved by such journals. The latter may
negatively impact the global reputation of the institution and the exposure of its research
output to the academic community. The discrepancies become more apparent when the
ranking of each individual publication is considered. Using a sample of AKSOB’s 2018, 2019,
2% 3% 10% 6%
58%
34%
31% 44%
37%
40% 33%
42%
3%
23% 26%
8%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
SJR JIF EF ABDC
A* A B C
6.6%
42.1% 42.1%
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
40%
45%
SJR JIF EF
Figure 1.
AKSOB Publications:
The plot on the left
shows the percentage
of indexed AKSOB
publications in each of
the considered
categories for the four
JRLs under
consideration. The
right plot depicts the
percentage of AKSOB
publications that
appear in journals not
indexed by the SJR and
JCR Lists
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2020 publications, the details and the total number of citations of each publication as
determined by Google Scholar [2] are listed in Tables 2–4, respectively.
In order to gain further insight, the differences between the four JRLs under consideration
are further examined. For all AKSOB’s publications that appear in journals listed as category
A* in ABDC, the classification of these journals with respect to the three remaining JRLs are
checked. We repeat the same analysis for categories A, B and C. The results are listed in
Table 5.
From the results reported in Table 5, the following issues are identified:
(1) Of the 9 publications classified by ABDC as A*, only 11% are classified as A* by SJR,
JIF and EF Lists. The JCR Lists classify 33% of these publications as category B.
(2) Of the 67 publications classified by ABDC as A, JIF and EF Lists rank 33 and 31%,
respectively, as A. In addition, both lists classify 13% of the publications as not listed.
Publications
Google Scholar
citations
SJR list
rank
ABDC list
rank
JIF list
rank
EF list
rank
Dah et al. (2018) 2BB BNA
El-Khalil and El-Kassar (2018) 3BB BNA
Tarhini et al. (2018) 6BB BNA
Fakih (2018) 4BB BC
Karaki (2018a) 4AA AB
Karaki (2018b) 0BA BC
Ramadan et al. (2018a) 9AA* AB
Farah et al. (2018) 36 A A A B
El-Kassar et al. (2018b) 0 NA B NA NA
Haj Youssef and Christodoulou
(2018)
3BB BNA
El Haddad et al. (2018) 6BB BNA
Dibeh et al. (2018) 15 NA A NA NA
Bitar et al. (2018) 2AA AB
Yunis et al. (2018) 57 A A A A
Nieroda et al. (2018) 13 A A A A
Cui et al. (2018) 10 A A A A
Dah and Jizi (2018) 3BA BNA
El Gammal et al. (2018a) 3BC BNA
EL-Khalil (2018) 2AB AA
El-Kassar et al. (2018a) 5AB AC
Fahd-Sreih and El-Kassar
(2018)
1BB BNA
Hallak et al. (2018a) 32 A A A A
Brown et al. (2018) 5BB BNA
Ladki and Bachir (2018) 1 NA C NA NA
Hallak et al. (2018b) 40 A A A B
Al-Dah et al. (2018) 9AB AB
El Gammal et al. (2018b) 22 A B A B
Jizi and Nehme (2018) 15 B A B C
Ramadan et al. (2018b) 12 B A B B
Ernst and Saliba (2018) 4AB AC
Nehme and Jizi (2018) 2BB BNA
Mrad (2018) 10 B B B NA
Kouatli (2018) 5BB BNA
Ben Sita (2018) 4BB BNA
Table 2.
Selected AKSOB
journal publications
in 2018
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ranking list?
367
(3) Of the 64 publications classified by ABDC as B, JIF and EF Lists rank only 11 and
16%, respectively, as B. In addition, both lists classify 67% of the publications as not
listed.
(4) The 12 publications that appear in C journals as classified by the ABDC are not listed
in JCR Lists.
From the latter analysis, the SJR List conforms more to the categorization of the ABDC List
than both the JCR Lists. However, for AKSOB publications that appear in journals of
categories B and C in the ABDC Lists, over 72% of these publishing journals are not indexed
by JCR. Generally, JCR indexes prestigious journals that meet high quality standards and that
have significant influence in their corresponding fields. As such, the publication strategy
Publications
Google Scholar
citations
SJR list
rank
ABDC list
rank
JIF list
rank
EF list
rank
Harakeh et al. (2019a) 4BA BNA
Arayssi et al. (2019a,b) 1BB BC
Engle-Warnick et al. (2020) 0BB BC
Haj Youssef et al. (2019a) 4AC ANA
Haj Youssef and Teng (2019) 3BC BNA
Haj Youssef et al. (2019b) 0AB AA
Coutts et al. (2019) 4AB AC
Abosedra et al. (2019) 0AA AB
Arayssi et al. (2019a,b) 3BB BC
Fakih and Marrouch (2019) 4CC CNA
El-Kassar et al. (2019) 8BB BNA
Tarhini et al. (2019) 0BB BNA
Itani et al. (2019) 21 A A* A A
Dibeh et al. (2019a) 3BA BC
Nehme et al. (2019) 0AB ANA
Karkoulian et al. (2019) 0AB ANA
Harakeh et al. (2019b) 4AA AB
Ramadan (2019a,b) 3AA AB
Mrad et al. (2019) 4AA AB
Abosag et al. (2019) 4AA AA
Mrad and Cui (2019) 2AA AA
Singh and El-Kassar (2019) 51 A A A NA
Dibeh et al. (2019b) 3AA AB
Farah et al. (2019) 19 A A A A
Ramadan et al. (2019) 11 A A A A
Sayour (2019) 2AA AB
Ramadan (2019a,b) 3BA BB
Alsalman and Karaki (2019) 3AA AC
El-Khalil and Darwish (2019) 5AA AA
Harakeh et al. (2019) 2AB AB
Ben Sita (2019) 1AB ANA
El Haddad (2019) 0BB BNA
Arayssi and Jizi (2019) 3BB BNA
Kouatli (2019) 0B B BNA
Singh et al. (2019) 26 A A A A
Dabbous and Tarhini (2019) 1AA AA
Mansour-Ichrakieh and
Zeaiter (2019)
1BB BC
Abdallah and Abdallah (2019) 2BB BNA
Dibeh et al. (2020) 3AA AC
Table 3.
Selected AKSOB
journal publications
in 2019
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adopted by AKSOB may deprive a significant amount of publications from the exposure
otherwise achieved from journals indexed by the JCR Lists. In addition, since different
institutions may consider performance evaluation based on one of the JCR Lists, the
publication strategy of AKSOB could be harmful to the academic profile of its faculty
members. It should also be noted that, after repeating the above analysis with the 2016 ABDC
List, we found that the 2019 ABDC List conforms more to the SJR List when compared to the
2016 ABDC List.
In order to analyze the citation-based impact for each JRL, we consider the citations
extracted from Google Scholar for each selected AKSOB publication. Although both Scopus
and WoS provide their own citation numbers, each database counts the citations that only
come from journals it indexes. In order to avoid this bias in citation counts, we resort to the
citation count provided by Google Scholar since it covers a larger pool of journals when
compared to both Scopus and WoS databases. This analysis is very important since, first,
institutions aim to achieve maximum exposure to their scholarly outputs and, second, all
popular world university ranking agencies highly depend on different citation-based metrics.
For a fair comparison, we simply consider the average citation per year for every paper. In
other terms, a paper published in 2016 with 50 citations in total will have an average of 12.5
citations per year. The latter methodology is employed since older papers normally
accumulate more citations than recently published ones. Due to the statistical insignificance
of the publications listed under categories A* and C, we combine the papers under categories
A* and A as well as those under categories B and C. The results are listed in Table 6.
From the results reported in Table 6, the following issues are identified:
Publications
Google Scholar
citations
SJR list
rank
ABDC list
rank
JIF list
rank
EF list
rank
Tarhini et al. (2020) 0AA AB
Maalouf et al. (2020) 0AC ANA
Assaker et al. (2020a,b,c) 6AA AA
Baalbaki and Marrouch
(2020)
0CC CNA
Farah and Shahzad (2020) 0AA AB
Harakeh et al. (2020) 0BB BNA
Gilsinan et al. (2020) 0BB BNA
Assaker (2020) 4AA AA
Assaker et al. (2020a,b,c) 0AA AA
Harakeh (2020) 1AA AB
Farah (2020) 0BB BNA
EL-Khalil et al. (2020) 1AB AA
Itani et al. (2020) 1AA AA
Farah and Ramadan (2020) 2AA AA
Mrad et al. (2020) 0AA AA
Assaker and O’Connor
(2020)
0A*A* A*A*
Assaker et al. (2020a,b,c) 2AA AB
Bandaly and Hassan
(2020)
1AA AA
Dah et al. (2020) 0AB AB
Fakih et al. (2020) 0 NA A NA NA
Kim et al. (2020) 0 NA B NA C
Arayssi et al. (2020) 1AB ANA
Al-Shaer and Harakeh
(2020)
2BA BNA
Table 4.
Selected AKSOB
journal publications
in 2020
Which journal
ranking list?
369
ABDC
SJR JCR JIF JCR EF
A* A B C NA A* A B C NA A* A B C NA
A* 180001530 0 1530 0
Out of 9 11% 89% 0% 0% 0% 11% 56% 33% 0% 0% 11% 56% 33% 0% 0%
A 2 49 14 0 2 2 22 25 9 9 8 21 16 13 9
Out of 67 3% 73% 21% 0% 3% 3% 33% 37% 13% 13% 12% 31% 24% 19% 13%
B 0 24 33 1 6 0 3 7 11 43 0 1 10 10 43
Out of 64 0% 38% 52% 2% 9% 0% 5% 11% 17% 67% 0% 2% 16% 16% 67%
C 02532000012000012
Out of 12 0% 17% 42% 25% 17% 0% 0% 0% 0% 100% 0% 0% 0% 0% 100%
Table 5.
Classification and
comparison of AKSOB
publications
EMJB
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370
(1) For outputs published in journals classified as category A* or A, the average yearly
citation per paper based on JIF is 46.8 and 41.07% larger than the average yearly
citation per paper associated with the SJR and ABDC Lists, respectively.
(2) For outputs published in journals classified as category B or C, the average yearly
citation per paper based on EF is 124.6 and 102% larger than the average yearly
citation per paper associated with the SJR and ABDC Lists, respectively.
(3) Both the ABDC and SJR Lists achieve very similar average yearly citations per paper
for the categories under consideration. The JIF List seems to achieve a higher average
yearly citations per paper in categories A* and A when compared to the EF List. The
latter, however, seems to provide a higher citation rate in categories B and C, as
suggested by the results.
The analyses above suggest that both JIF and EF achieve the highest citation-based impact in
the general field of Business and Economics. In fact, out of all the AKSOB publications with
zero citations, 54% are published in journals not listed in JCR, whereas only 15.3% were not
listed in the SJR List. All of these publications are published in journals that are in fact listed
by ABDC. Compared to the other considered lists, it can be observed that JCR JIF and EF
journal rankings are more indicative in terms of citation-based impact. Since institutions aim
to provide the highest exposure possible to their research, it seems that adopting JRLs that
are based on JIF or EF is recommended. Moreover, our results suggest that JIF provides better
indication of the citation rates achieved by journals of high to medium quality whereas EF
seems to provide better indication for journals of medium to low quality. In addition, our
results suggest that the citation profile of AKSOB is similar with respect to the ABDC and SJR
Lists. The latter results conform to the existing literature as discussed in Section 2.
5. Conclusion, implications, limitations and future work
5.1 Discussion and conclusions
This paper explores key differences among multiple JRLs by conducting extensive analysis
to compare the content and exposure provided by the ABDC List, the SJR List and JCR’s JIF
and EF Lists. Limiting the analysis to journals in the fields of Business and Economics, we
propose a method to categorize journals in the SJR and JCR Lists using the same
categorization adopted by the ABDC List resulting in four comparable JRLs. As a proxy
impact metric, a normalized citation count is associated with each article based on Google
Scholar. Based on the four considered JRLs, the publications of a school (AKSOB) with
medium research output are assessed in terms of quality and citations while considering the
exposure to popular world university ranking tables. Our results provide insightful answers
to the posed research questions and provide recommendations on which JRL can be more
influential for both faculty development and positioning of the university, as follows:
RQ1. Which JRL is the most objective and indicative in terms of journal exposure, quality
and citations?
(1) In terms of journal quality, our results suggest that the categorization provided by the
ABDC List for high to medium quality journals is indicative but double-checking the
SJR ABDC JCR JIF JCR EF
Categories A* and A 7.53 7.84 11.06 9.31
Categories B and C 2.23 2.48 4.20 5.01
Table 6.
Average yearly
citation per publication
for the considered JRLs
Which journal
ranking list?
371
classification of a selected journal with different databases can be insightful,
especially when researchers are after journals of high-impact. The latter is especially
recommended since some journals of category A* in ABDC are not highly ranked by
JCR.
(2) For journals of medium to low quality, our results indicate that the content provided
by the ABDC List is not recommended as a significant portion of these journals is not
indexed by Scopus and WoS. In general, researchers who seek prestigious journals
indexed by both databases should cross-list journals of category C in the ABDC List
with journals indexed by Scopus and WoS.
(3) In terms of exposure and citation, our results indicate that both the ABDC and SJR
Lists provide similar average yearly citations per paper for the categories under
consideration. More importantly, results provide evidence that the JIF and EF
indicators are better in quantifying the levels of exposure provided by journals. In
particular, the conducted analysis implies that the JCR JIF List provides better
indication of the citation rates achieved by journals of high to medium quality whereas
the EF List seems to provide better indication for journals of medium to low quality.
RQ2. If the publication behavior of an institution is guided and driven by a specific JRL, is it
possible that the institution is unintentionally harming the publication profile and academic
career of its researchers through the latter practice?
(1) By guiding its publication strategy based on the ABDC List, the publication profile of
AKSOB seems to have over 80% of its publications in journals of high to medium
quality, as per the ABDC and SJR Lists. However, based on the JCR Lists, over 40% of
AKSOB’s publications are no longer listed. Of the ones that are listed by JCR, over
60% appear in journals of medium to low quality based on the JIF JCR List. The latter
analysis provides evidence that the quality of the publication profile of an institution
can be significantly different with respect to different JRLs. In addition, as faculty
members and researchers abide by the publication strategy of AKSOB, their
publication profiles become highly dependent on the adopted JRL. The latter is
especially harmful since many funding agencies, academic institutions and
companies (R&D) depend on JIF or EF instead of SJR or ABDC as a quality
assessment measure. In that sense, AKSOB might be unintentionally harming the
career of its academic through the adopted publication strategy.
(2) The performed citationanalysis suggests that both JIF and EF are betterindicators for
journals that achieve the highest citation-based impact in the general field of Business
and Economics. The latterholds true especiallyfor journals that are ranked among the
top 28% according to JIF or EF. Based on EF, the average yearly citation per paper for
journals under categories B and C is over 100% largerthan the average yearly citation
calculated for the journals under the same category in the SJR and ABDC Lists. As
many ranking agencies depend on citation-based metrics, the publication strategy of
AKSOB may be negatively impacting these metrics. The latter has direct implications
on the ranking of the institution, especially for ranking agencies where citation-based
metrics contribute a large percentage to the calculated rank of the institution. Through
the latte practice, AKSOB may be unintentionally harming its local and international
reputation, which may reflect badly on the quality of its research.
Generally, one may conclude that JIF and EF Lists better illustrate the quality and exposure
of journals in Business and Economics. Overall, it is recommended to select journals that are
indexed by both WoS and Scopus.
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372
5.2 Theoretical and practical implications
This study makes several important implications. For the theoretical implications, this work
proposed a mapping from quantitative-metrics-based JRLs to category-based JRLs which
provides the ability to compare different JRLs in a fair manner. In addition, this study
developed a normalized citation count associated with each article based on Google Scholar in
an attempt to evaluate the citation-based impact of different JRLs. As for the practical
implications, the findings provide recommendations for scholars, administrators and global
universities, including Euro-Med Universities, on which JRL can be more influential for both
faculty development and positioning of the university. The results suggest that universities
and schools must carefully adopt a particular JRL since it has been demonstrated that JRLs
are capable of redefining the publication behavior of an entire institution and can
unintentionally harm or hinder the future scholarly output of the institution. In addition, it is
suggested that schools encourage their faculty members to publish in impactful journals,
such as EuroMed, that are listed simultaneously in WoS, Scopus and ABDC List. This enables
schools and universities to achieve their scholarly output goals in terms of quality, impact
and exposure. Also, such strategies adopted by a university can promote faculty brand
(Quaratino and Mazzei, 2018), enhance the perceived social performance of the university, and
lead to affective and calculated commitment (Arfaoui et al., 2019). It is worth noting that a
school with a regionally oriented mission, such as AKSOB, can highly benefit from
encouraging its faculty members to publish in journals such as EuroMed. In doing so, faculty
can increase the impact of their publications (Santoro et al., 2019). In addition, these
publications can become more visible to top notch multi-regional scholars leading to possible
collaboration, which is key to gain value (Alsaad et al., 2018). Finally, this study developed a
methodology to assess the impact of adopting multiple JRLs on the publication profile of an
institution. Despite the challenging nature of the posed research questions, we believe that
this study provided novel insight on the adoption of JRLs and their impact on different
institutional entities.
5.3 Limitations and future work
This study comes with multiple limitations. First, our analysis was based on a sample of 152
journal articles published by the same institution. We believe that performing the same study
for multiple institutions may provide further insights on the extracted conclusions. Second,
the study was conducted for a Lebanese university, which may have an impact on the results
of the work. In specific, as the culture of research differs from one country to another, the
results of this study can be further generalized by considering institutions from different
countries. Third, this study was limited to the general fields of Business and Economics.
Future work could focus on performing similar analysis in different disciplines in order to
provide more general recommendations for institutions, researchers and ranking agencies.
Notes
1. Publications between January 1 and July 15, 2020
2. Retrieved on June 15, 2020.
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Corresponding author
Abdul-Nasser El-Kassar can be contacted at: abdulnasser.kassar@lau.edu.lb
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