The Impact Rating of Academic Journals in Economics: Ranking Criteria and Methodology

• Main Author: Tret’yakova Ol’ga V.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Russian Academy of Sciences, Vologda Research Center 2018-07-01
• Series: Economic and Social Changes: Facts, Trends, Forecast
• Subjects: economic journal; russian science citation index (rsci); impact rating of scientific journals; russian academy of sciences; bibliometric index; journal impact factor; authority of the journal
• Online Access: http://esc.vscc.ac.ru/article/2673/full?_lang=en

The rapid growth of the number of academic journals has brought to the fore the issue of choosing the leading ones among them. In this paper, we summarize current methodological approaches to the evaluation of scientific journals and substantiate the applicability of bibliometric indicators for assessing the importance and relevance of publications in the scientific community. The results of comparative assessment of economic journals affiliated by RAS institutions are presented in the form of impact rating based on the analysis of bibliometric data of the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) and reflecting the level of impact of publications included in the RSCI. We substantiate the composition of indicators that enable us to make a comprehensive assessment of journals and that are available to be used to verify the results. We prove that the composition of the criteria and the method of their aggregation are suitable for ranking scientific journals; this is confirmed by the fact that the results correlate with the data of other ratings. We rank the journals using multidimensional comparative analysis based on the distance method. We identify the core of ten leading scientific journals in economics that are affiliated with academic organizations. We prove that they are the scientific editions well-known among the academia and they have an impact on the development of economic science in the country. The prospects of the study are seen in the application of the described technique to the ranking of all economic journals. The results can be used by scientific organizations for determining strategic priorities in the development of scientific journals