The importance of ABS 2 journals in finance scholarship: Evidence from a bibliometric case study

Recently among finance academic journals, it has become no longer the case that the highest externally rated journals are necessarily the most cited. Through the lens of a bibliometric case study, we highlight the integral contribution of ABS 2 articles to bibliometric-based conclusions. We demonstrate that selecting ABS2+ versus ABS3+ significantly changes results. Conceptually, we argue that as bibliometric analysis is citation based, a priori cutoffs for article inclusion should also be journal citation based, rather than external journal rankings based. Now that several ABS 2 journals are among the highest cited journals in finance, reconsiderations are needed.