Journal editorship index for assessing the scholarly impact of academic institutions: An empirical analysis in the field of economics

Abstract Assessing the scholarly impact of academic institutions has become increasingly important. The achievements of editorial board members can create benchmarks for research excellence and can be used to evaluate both individual and institutional performance. This paper proposes a new method based on journal editor data for assessing an institution’s scholarly impact. In this paper, a journal editorship index (JEI) that simultaneously accounts for the journal rating (JR), editor title (ET), and board size (BS) is constructed. We assess the scholarly impact of economics institutions based on the editorial boards of 211 economics journals (which include 8640 editorial board members) in the ABS Academic Journal Guide. Three indices (JEI/ET, JEI/JR, and JEI/BS) are also used to rank the institutions. It was found that there was only a slight change in the relative institutional rankings using the JEI/ET and JEI/BS compared to the JEI. The BS and ET weight factors did not have a substantial influence on the ranking of institutions. It was also found that the journal rating weight factor had a large effect on the ranking of institutions. This paper presents an alternative approach to using editorial board memberships as the basis for assessing the scholarly impact of economics institutions.

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