Are FT50 journals really leading? A comment on Fassin

In his recent Scientometrics article, Fassin (2021) asked the following question: Does the FT50 journal list select the best management and economics journals? After collecting, calculating, and analyzing data about nine bibliometric indicators, Fassin responded to that question by stating that “[t]his bibliometric study confirms that the FT50 selection is able to identify the elite journals in economics and general management and most premier journals in the sub-disciplines”. In this Letter to the Editor, the author would like to highlight three major limitations in Fassin’s (2021) study: the first limitation is that the provided general ranking is biased towards journals that publish relatively more review articles. The second limitation is that it ignores Goodhart’s law. The third limitation is related to the very definition of a leading journal.

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