Aspects of the Production of Significant Financial Research

ALTHOUGH IT IS NOT a perfect measure, an academic publication's impact or significance can probably best be judged by the number of times it is cited by subsequent articles in the field. Using this index of significance for articles published in the Journal of Finance (JOF) and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (JFQA) over the period 1967-1972, this article explores several aspects of the production and publication of 'significant' financial research. Key questions are the extent to which finance articles differ in their impact, how highly cited articles differ from articles which are rarely cited, and the extent to which a ranking of finance departments by citations differs from a ranking in terms of articles or pages published. Since the study is based on the proposition that an article's significance or quality can best be measured in terms of the number of times it is cited by other writers, the advantages and disadvantages of this measure are discussed in Part I before the significance and importance of financial research articles are explored in Part II and before questions concerning article importance and the author's institutional affiliation are considered in III. Characteristics of significant articles are examined in Part IV and the study's results are summarized in V.