Last week, I tried out a new way of “ranking” economics journals, based on the percent of 2018-2019 authors who have also published in one of the top 5 economics journals anytime since 2000. This week, I decided to take a look at finance journals (political science is next in line, as well as some extensions and robustness checks for econ journals).
The top 3 finance journals are generally agreed to be Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. How do other finance journals stack up against them according to this metric? For fun and fairness, I threw in the top 5 econ journals into the mix, as well as Management Science.
Here are the “top 10” journals according to this metric (not counting the reference top 3, of course). The first numerical column gives the percent of authors that published in the journal specified in the row in 2018-2019 who have also published an article in any of the top 3 finance journals at some point since 2000. The next three columns give journal-specific percentages.
Because this is not my field, I have less to say about the reasonableness of this ranking, but perhaps finance readers can comment on whether this lines up with their perception of quality. Compared to the econ rankings, the raw percentage differences between journals appear larger, at least at the very top. And the overall frequency of publishing in the top 3 is lower. Management Science makes the top 5, but the top econ journals do not (
JPE and ReStud do make the top 10). To me, this makes sense, since it’s pretty clear that this ranking picks up connectedness as well as quality. Anecdotally, finance departments seem to value Management Science and the top 5 econ journals no more and perhaps less than the top 3 finance journals.
Here are the rest of the journals I ranked (as before, if a journal is not on the list, it doesn’t mean it’s ranked lower, it means I didn’t rank it). Here, we can clearly see that not many people who publish in JF, JFE, and RFS publish in AER, QJE, or Econometrica.
If there’s another journal you’d like to see ranked in reference to the top 3 finance ones, please comment!