Another brick in the wall: a new ranking of academic journals in Economics using FDH

Abstract

The academic journals rankings are widely used for academic purposes, especially in the field of Economics. There are many procedures to construct academic journals rankings. Some of them are based on citation analysis while other are based on expert opinion. In this study, we introduced a methodological innovation to aggregate different performance measures to build an alternative ranking of journals in Economics. Our approach is based on a pure output oriented Free Disposal Hull (FDH). We analyzed four indicators—Journal Impact Factor, Discounted Impact Factor, h-index, and Article Influence—for a set of 232 journals in Economics. The results allow us to reach two main conclusions. First, the ranking based on the FDH method seems to be consistent with other well-known reference rankings (i.e.: KMS, Invariant, Ambitious and Area Score). Second, the additional information that provides the FDH model may be used by the Editorial Board to formulate strategies to achieve goals. For instance, to improve a journal score by comparing it with the scores of similar journals.