Financial Management's Success as an Academic Journal

Financial Management (Financial Management Association), Autumn, 1999 by Kenneth A. Borokhovich, Robert J. Bricker, Betty J. Simkins

At its inception, Financial Management (FM) had the difficult mission of serving the needs of all members of the Financial Management Association International (FMA), both academic and practitioner. That mission has now changed. FM's revised mission is to focus solely on the publication of original scholarly research of the highest quality. This paper employs citation analysis to evaluate FM's relative performance among academic research journals in finance. The evidence from the analysis is consistent across all measures. FM ranks among the top five finance journals. Additionally, the trend is toward increasing influence.

* At its inception, Financial Management (FM) had the difficult mission of serving the needs of all members of the Financial Management Association International (FMA), both academic and practitioner. Borokhovich, Bricker, Zivney, and Sundaram (1995) document the success FM has historically enjoyed. Unfortunately, as explained by its current editors, Douglas R. Emery and John D. Finnerty (1998), the journal's success has not been uniform. The FMA Board of Directors reached the conclusion that, although academicians have been well served by FM, the journal has not been successful at reaching an appreciable number of practitioners. In fact, it was precisely this conclusion that led to the creation of Financial Practice and Education and Contemporary Finance Digest by the FMA. These two journals are now responsible for addressing the needs of practitioners. Concurrently, FM's revised mission is to focus solely on the publication of original scholarly research of the highest quality.

In light of its revised mission, this paper evaluates FM's relative performance among academic research journals in finance. Consistent with other studies, the evaluation is conducted using citation analysis. For example, Schwert (1993) presents citation measures as the primary quantitative evidence that the Journal of Financial Economics is a leading journal. Other studies employing citations as a measure of journal influence are Coe and Weinstock (1983), Liebowitz and Palmer (1984), Mabry and Sharplin (1985), Zivney and Reichenstein (1994), Borokhovich, Bricker, Brunarski, and Simkins (1995, 1998), and Fishe (1998). While the relevance of citation analysis has been debated in the past as summarized by Leamer (1981), Christenson and Sigelman (1985) conclude that citations imply acknowledgement of the importance of the work. The acceptance of citation analysis in the finance literature is a tacit acknowledgement that the prestige of a journal should be based more on objective measures of the usefulness of the articles and less on subjective popular opinion.

This study examines a number of citation-based measures covering short-term, intermediate-term, and long-term influence. The evidence from the analysis is consistent across all measures. FM ranks among the top five finance journals, and the trend is toward increasing influence.

The impact factor was developed by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which publishes the SSCI, to provide a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal is cited in a particular year. It is calculated as the number of times articles published in year t cite a specific journal's articles published in years t-1 and t-2, divided by the total number of articles the journal published in years t-1 and t-2.

The remainder of the paper is as follows. Section I defines the citation measures used in the analysis and describes how they are interpreted. Section II presents the empirical evidence. Concluding remarks are provided in the final section.

I. Citation-Based Measures of Journal Influence

The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) is the source for data and measures of influence used in this study. Only academic journals are included in the SSCI. Inclusion in the SSCI is in and of itself a measure of influence, because only the most frequently cited journals in a specific field are selected for inclusion. Therefore, taken together, the 14 finance journals included in the SSCI during at least some time in the past 15 years can be considered to be more influential than the myriad number of other finance journals that have not achieved this milestone of distinction, In fact, as finance journals have gained or lost influence they have been added to, or dropped from, the SSCI. The citation measures addressed in this study are the impact factor, immediacy index, and the product of the impact factor and cited half-life, each calculated annually by the SSCI. Each of the measures provides a different perspective on a journal's influence.

The ISI developed the immediacy index to measure how quickly the articles published in a specific journal are cited in other articles. This information is useful in determining which journals are publishing articles in emerging areas of research and producing timely research of interest to other researchers. This index is calculated as the number of times the articles in a specific journal are cited in year t, divided by the number of articles published in the journal in year t.