Ranking of finance journals: a stochastic dominance analysis

Purpose - Prior studies in citation-based journal rankings tend to be static to compare across journals. One journal may be judged better in citations than other journals at some points in time but not at the others. The assumption that the citation distribution is normally distributed and that the citation observations are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) may not be appropriate. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach - This study uses a stochastic dominance (SD) analysis, which overcomes the dynamic nature of changes in citation over time. The SD method proposed by Linton, Maasoumi, and Whang (hereafter LMW, 2005) does not require the data to be i.i.d. We use the LMW method to compare the relative ranking of 23 finance journals using citations for all articles from them during 1990-2010. Findings - The study indicates that the citation distribution changes over time. Thus a SD analysis is a better approach for a comparison of journal ranking. The findings unambiguously place JF, JFE, RFS, JFQA, and JFI in the top five spots of the finance journal ranking. The "near-top" journals, such as JBF, JCF, and FM, are not clear cut in the SD analysis. Research limitations/implications - The results confirm that ranking for the lower ranked journals may change over time especially, but the top three journals appear to be robust across methods and over time. Originality/value - The results of SD analysis provides more convincing evidence on finance journal ranking and could be useful to rank academic institutions, faculty research quality, and help the authors to decide what to read and which journals are influential.