08832323.2011.582896
Journal of Education for Business
ISSN: 0883-2323 (Print) 1940-3356 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vjeb20
Ranking Business and Economics Journals in South
America Using the Scientific Electronic Library
Online (SciELO)
Jennifer K. Alexander , Lorena Pradenas , Víctor Parada & Robert F. Scherer
To cite this article: Jennifer K. Alexander , Lorena Pradenas , Víctor Parada & Robert F. Scherer
(2012) Ranking Business and Economics Journals in South America Using the Scientific
Electronic Library Online (SciELO), Journal of Education for Business, 87:3, 152-158, DOI:
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Date: 11 January 2016, At: 21:59
JOURNAL OF EDUCATION FOR BUSINESS, 87: 152–158, 2012
C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Copyright
ISSN: 0883-2323 print / 1940-3356 online
DOI: 10.1080/08832323.2011.582896
Ranking Business and Economics Journals in South
America Using the Scientific Electronic Library
Online (SciELO)
Jennifer K. Alexander
Downloaded by [Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji] at 21:59 11 January 2016
Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Lorena Pradenas
Universidad de Concepci´on, Concepci´on, Chile
V´ıctor Parada
Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Santiago, Chile
Robert F. Scherer
Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Access to published research for knowledge creation and education in the administrative
science disciplines in South America has been enhanced since the introduction of the Scientific
Electronic Library Online (SciELO). Although SciELO has been available as an online journal
indexing and publication service since 1998, there have been no bibliometric investigations
conducted to identify the quality of journals available through the database. The authors used
4 common ranking measures and an overall index to evaluate the quality of SciELO journals.
Age and discipline of the journal seem to be important factors to support impact and ranking.
Implications of the findings for business school faculty, administrators, and researchers are
discussed.
Keywords: business research, journal ranking, SciELO, South America
A spate of articles in the academic literature attests to the importance of quality rankings for academic journals. Journal
articles establish the forum for communicating the latest scientific research and they are the most immediate and viable
means for vetting new ideas in a field and informing one’s
teaching (Clark, 1997). Academic journals are, thus, an essential resource for knowledge generation and dissemination.
In university settings, academic publication is considered the
gold standard for determining the strength of a scholar’s per¨
formance (Ozbilgin,
2009). Foundations evaluate the quality
of a scholar’s publications when reviewing proposals for research grant funding. In circumstances of tenure and career
advancement, journal rankings provide critical information
Correspondence should be addressed to Robert F. Scherer, Cleveland State University, Ahuja College of Business, 2121 Euclid Avenue,
Cleveland, OH 44115, USA. E-mail: r.scherer@csuohio.edu
for evaluating the strength of a faculty member’s contributions (Serneko, 2009).
Given the reliance on journal quality for knowledge
generation and career advancement, considerable attention
has been directed to the impact of journals published in the
United States and Northern Europe (Meneghini, Packer, &
Nassi-Cal`o, 2008). However, remarkably little analysis has
been directed to journals that represent scholarship outside
of the developed world. This difference can be attributed
to an unfortunate reality: Knowledge is a commodity that
has flowed from the industrialized world to the developing
world such that the United States, the European Union, and
Japan account for 78.3% of the world’s scientific research
(European Commission, 2003; Salager-Meyer, 2008). The
reasons for this disparity in scientific output can be attributed
to a number of mutually reinforcing barriers for scholarship
offered by developing nations. They are most notably,
language and resources.
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SCIELO JOURNAL RANKINGS
The lingua franca for scholarly publication is English.
Researchers from developing nations have been required to
develop the language skills necessary to publish their research in English and preferably in Thomson Institute for
Scientific Information (ISI) quality journals or risk falling
on the periphery of research in their fields. A variety of
studies reveal that scientific publications among a nation’s
science community are highly correlated with proficiency in
English (Man, Weinkauf, Tsang, & Sin, 2004; Meneghini
et al., 2008; Vasconcelos, Sorenson, & Leta, 2007; Victora
& Moreira, 2006). Additionally, scholars in the developing
world experience considerable difficulty securing access to
up-to-date information necessary to generate research. Journals are costly and there are vast differences in access to
printed materials as well as Internet resources, depending
on the subscriptions of academic institutions. Lack of access
to personal computers or Internet further limits the ability
of scholars to submit manuscripts electronically and isolates
them from the ongoing research dialogue. The vast differential in access to information shapes not only the production
of knowledge, but also participation in the social world of
scholars (Arunachalam, 2003).
JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS IN LATIN AMERICA
Recent developments hold the promise of leveling the playing field and advancing scholarship in developing nations in
significant respects, most notably the development of electronic information and open access journals. The advent of
electronic information has dramatically reduced the costs
associated with distribution and dissemination of information. As the costs associated with journal access continues to
plummet through the myriad of rapidly arising networks promoting open electronic access, researchers are able to acquire
the most present research. In recent years, the combination
of technological advancements and institutional efforts has
enhanced access to information through the creation of free
Internet archives.
One of the more celebrated examples of cooperative electronic publishing is the Scientific Electronic Library Online
(SciELO), established in Brazil in 1998. SciELO is a network of 15 national and two thematic open access journal
collections that include over a dozen countries, three continents, and more than 600 titles (Packer, 2009). The SciELO journal collections include the best journals published
in Ibero-America, including Latin America, the Caribbean,
Portugal, and Spain. Packer noted that the “monthly average
of more than 12 million articles accessed per month” places
SciELO among the “top-accessed, research-related websites
in Ibero-America” (p. 112). The widespread recognition that
scholarship in the developing world was lost science, seldom read or cited, was a critical event that contributed to
the establishment of SciELO (Gibbs, 1995). In effect, Sci-
153
ELO represents an effort to augment visibility, quality, and
quantity of scholarship focused on issues of relevance to
the South.
SciELO fosters scientific productivity around priorities
of relevance to developing nations, aggregating and advancing knowledge that is contextualized. Journals reflect the
priorities of “networks of cultural, educational and political
institutions” and their respective “metropolitan, national and
international contexts” (Crysler, 2003, p. 189). As a result,
the topics and themes that are salient in international journals
differ from those that hold sway for a region. Open access
journal networks create the opportunity to shift the research
agenda to particular needs. Although developing nations put
a high premium on technological advancement, scientific
research has been a lower priority and there is a high correlation between technological development and science (King,
2004, Man et al., 2004; Salager-Meyer, 2008).
Moreover, journal articles published in a language that is
readily accessible expand access to the conversations where
research is digested and built upon with stakeholders (e.g.,
policymakers, private sector industry, government officials;
Nerad, 2010; Salager-Meyer, 2008). One of the most important trends of the past decade is that knowledge production has become a process that involves multiple actors,
including universities, industry, business, and governments
(Nerad; Gibbons et al., 1994). As the generation of knowledge is increasingly linked through outcome measures to
regional stakeholders, there is a need to be able to communicate research findings to this regional audience and
this need has fostered the need for regionalized scholarly
networks (Nerad).
The present research comprises the first bibliometric
analysis of research journals in the area of business and
economics for Ibero-America. Other analyses have been
conducted on journals in the area of psychiatry and clinical
psychology (Quevedo-Blasco, Dias-Piedra, & Guglielmi,
2010), general publication and citation patterns within
Latin American and Caribbean journals (Collazo-Reyes,
Luna-Morales, Russell, & P´erez-Ang´on, 2008), and in other
nations, for example, the bibliometric study of computer
science in Malaysia (Bakri & Willett, 2009). Results of
studies confirm the trends of a knowledge gap between
developing and developed nations, and manifest as little
intercitation (Collazo-Reyes et al.), scholars from the
developing countries more frequently citing scholarship
published in English, and research from developing nations
less often cited by scholars from the North (Bakri & Willett).
Given the importance of published scholarship in tenure and
promotion decisions as well as the relationship between re¨
search and teaching (Clark, 1997; Ozbilgin,
2009; Serenko,
2009), the present study on ranking SciELO journals
provides insight for faculty, business school administrators,
and review committees with respect the value and impact of
research.
154
J. K. ALEXANDER ET AL.
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IDENTIFYING THE JOURNALS IN THE
SciELO DATABASE
To identify the population of business and economics journals in the SciELO database we searched for all journals
coded as accepting manuscripts in business, economics, or
administrative science between the years 2003–2008. This
was necessary, as there is overlap between business and economics disciplines throughout South America. Depending on
the country, business research may be labeled as economics
and vice versa. Public administration is also a combination of
business and economics in South America, so we broadened
the search to include any journals dealing with these three
topical areas. Additionally, journals included in the present
study had to be publishing articles for at least two years
(see subsequent explanation in Citation Analysis and Ranking the Journals), and be published by an organization in
South America.
The SciELO database contains a total of 766 journals (Scientific Electronic Library Online, 2010). Our search yielded
22 journals that met the previous inclusion criteria. Table 1
details the characteristics of the 22 journals comprising our
study of rankings. Review of the descriptive information revealed that the greatest number of journals was published by
TABLE 1
Characteristics of the Journals
Characteristic
Country
Brazil
Chile
Argentina
Venezuela
Sponsor
University center
Research institute or center of research
Association or independent council
Year of first edition in SciELO
1997–2000
2001–2005
2006–2010
Number of years published
20 or more
10–19
5–9
1–4
Language(s)
Portuguese
Spanish
Spanish, English
Spanish, Portuguese, English
Spanish, Portuguese, English, French
Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, German
Number of indexes
1–6
7–13
aRounded
to the nearest whole number (N = 22).
na
%
63.64
18.18
9.09
9.09
45.45
22.73
31.82
3
12
7
13.64
54.55
31.81
45.00
36.00
9.00
9.00
45.45
27.27
9.09
9.09
4.55
4.55
81.82
18.18
organizations in Brazil (63.64%). The majority of the journals were sponsored by universities (45.45%), with the first
volume being cataloged on the SciELO system between 2001
and 2005. However, it should be noted that the range of first
volume publication was from 1947 (Journal of the Economy of Brazil) through 2006 (Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research). Portuguese was the
most frequent language required by the journals for publication of research (45.45%), although some journals accepted
manuscripts for submission in Spanish, English, French, and
German. In addition to being indexed in SciELO, the majority of journals included in the present study were indexed by
1–6 other indexing services (81.82%; e.g., ISI).
CITATION ANALYSIS AND RANKING THE
JOURNALS
With the 22 journals for inclusion identified, we turned our
attention to constructing indices for ranking. We followed
the method used by Katerattanakul, Han, and Hong (2003),
which objectifies the ranking process. Rather than utilize perceptions of journal quality, we used four quantitative measures to assess journal quality rank and then computed an
average across the four measures to obtain an average journal rank for each individual journal, which resulted in the
journals included in our study being ranked from 1 (highest
ranked) to 22 (lowest ranked). The four measures included
annual mean citations per article, present article impact, cited
to citing ratio, and the immediacy factor. These four citation
analysis measures are commonly used as bibliometric indicators of journal quality (Garfield, 1979). Previously it was
noted that for a journal to be included in our study it had to be
publishing articles for at least two years between the period
2003 and 2008. We used this decision rule, similar to Katerattanakul et al., to account for the lag between publication of
an article and citation of the article by other researchers in
their own research. Table 2 shows how each journal scored
on each of the four measures and the rank for the journal on
the individual measures.
Annual Mean Citations per Article
Published scholarly research is based on providing support and justification for arguments made in a manuscript
(Garfield, 1979). The annual mean citations per article indicates the degree to which an article is utilized by other
researchers in supporting their own investigations. This measure was constructed by dividing the number of annual citations per article by the number of years since the article’s
initial publication and then averaging across all articles in a
particular journal for the years covered by the present study.
The measure controls for the number of years elapsed since
publication of the article, reducing the effect of time. Annual
mean citations per article ranged from 0 to 1.85. A higher
number of annual mean citations per article indicates that
SCIELO JOURNAL RANKINGS
155
TABLE 2
Indices of Journal Quality and Ranking
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Journal name
Revista Brasileira de Economia (Brazil)
Brazilian Journal of Economics
Cuadernos de Econom´ıa (Brazil)
Latin American Journal of Economics
Revista de Economia Pol´ıtica (Brazil)
Brazilian Journal of Political Economy
Economia Aplicada (Brazil)
Applied Economics
Nova Economia (Brazil)
The New Economy
Revista de Administrac¸a˜ o Contemporˆanea (Brazil)
Journal of Contemporary Management
Revista de Economia e Sociologia Rural (Brazil)
Journal of Economics and Rural Sociology
Revista de Administrac¸a˜ o P´ublica (Brazil)
Journal of Public Administration
Revista de Economia Contemporˆanea (Brazil)
Journal of Contemporary Economics
RAE Electrˆonica (Brazil)
RAE Electronics
S˜ao Paulo em Perspectiva (Brazil)
Sao Paulo in Perspective
Investigaci´on y Postgrado (Venezuela)
Research and Graduate
Economia e Sociedade (Brazil)
Economy and Society
Estudios de Econom´ıa (Chile)
Economic Studies
Caderno CRH (Brazil)
CRH Notebook
Estudos Econˆomicos (S˜ao Paulo) (Brazil)
Economic Studies
Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic
Commerce Researcha (Chile)
Estudios y Perspectivas en Turismo (Argentina)
Tourism Studies and Perspectives
Documentos y Aportes en Administraci´on P´ublica
y Gesti´on Estatal (Argentina)
Documents and Contributions in Public
Administration and State
Gaceta Laboral (Venezuela)
Labor Gazette
Revista Contabilidade & Financ¸as (Brazil)
Journal of Accounting and Finance
Journal of Technology Management and Innovation
(Chile)a
Annual mean
citations per
article
Present article
impact
Cited to citing
ratio
Immediacy
factor
1.85
(1)
0.11
(1)
0.07
(1)
.01
(8)
3.0
(1)
1947
0.90
(3)
0.04
(7)
0.03
(4)
.18
(1)
3.6
(2)
1963
1.14
(2)
0.08
(3)
0.05
(2)
.02
(6)
5.0
(3)
1981
0.62
(7)
0.08
(2)
0.02
(8)
.02
(5)
6.2
(4)
1997
0.81
(4)
0.05
(6)
0.03
(6)
.00
(11)
6.6
(5)
1990
0.52
(9)
0.05
(5)
0.01
(9)
.01
(10)
7.0
(6)
1997
0.61
(8)
0.04
(9)
0.03
(3)
.00
(11)
8.2
(7)
1962
0.79
(5)
0.02
(11)
0.02
(7)
.02
(7)
8.6
(8)
1967
0.41
(11)
0.06
(4)
0.01
(10)
.00
(11)
8.8
(9)
1997
0.28
(12)
0.04
(8)
0.01
(14)
.00
(11)
9.2
(10)
2002
0.63
(6)
0.04
(10)
0.04
(5)
.01
(9)
9.4
(11)
1987
0.22
(15)
0.00
(13)
0.01
(12)
.00
(11)
11.2
(12)
1985
0.44
(10)
0.00
(13)
0.01
(11)
.00
(11)
12.0
(13)
1992
0.24
(14)
0.00
(13)
0.01
(13)
.06
(3)
12.4
(14)
1973
0.25
(13)
0.00
(13)
0.01
(15)
.00
(11)
13.2
(15)
1987
0.00
(22)
0.00
(13)
0.00
(22)
.02
(4)
13.6
(16)
1971
0.11
(17)
0.00
(13)
0.00
(17)
.08
(2)
14.0
(17)
2006
0.13
(16)
0.02
(12)
0.01
(16)
.00
(11)
14.2
(18)
1991
0.04
(19)
0.00
(13)
0.00
(20)
.00
(11)
14.8
(19)
2001
0.04
(20)
0.00
(13)
0.00
(18)
.00
(11)
16.0
(20)
1995
0.04
(18)
0.00
(13)
0.00
(19)
.00
(11)
16.2
(21)
1989
0.01
(21)
0.00
(13)
0.00
(21)
.00
(11)
17.6
(22)
2005
Average
ranking score
Year
established
Note. Bracketed numbers indicate a journal’s ranking for the specific index. English names of journals provided in italics.
title is only in English.
aJournal
the research is utilized to a greater or lesser extent. In order,
Journal of the Economy of Brazil, Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, and Latin American Journal of Economics had
the greatest number of citations per article. Journals with the
lowest number of citations per article included The Economic
Studies, Journal of Technology Management and Innovation,
and Labor Gazette. For this measure, journals in the field of
economics ranked the highest.
Present Article Impact
Importance of an article can be gauged by assessing the
impact the research has had on subsequent published
research (Garfield, 1979). In the SciELO database, a
journal’s impact factor for the year of interest is calculated
based on the number of citations in the previous two years
made to all articles in a particular journal divided by the
156
J. K. ALEXANDER ET AL.
total number of articles published in that two year base
period. Impact factors for the 2003–2008 period under study
were averaged. Higher impact factors indicate a journal has
greater influence on subsequent research. Journals with the
strongest present article impact were Journal of the Economy
of Brazil, Brazilian Journal of Applied Economics, and
Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, respectively. Ten
of the journals tied for having present article impact factors
of zero indicating their relative lack of influence on the
business, economics, and administrative science literature.
These 10 journals spanned the discipline-specific areas.
Average Ranking Score
Our final objective was to obtain an overall ranking of each
of the 22 journals included in the study. We averaged the
rankings for each journal on the individual indexes to yield
an average ranking score. This measure indicates the quality
ranking of the journals in comparison among themselves.
In order, Journal of the Economy of Brazil, Latin American
Journal of Economics, and Brazilian Journal of Political
Economy were the ranked first, second, and third. Journal
of Technology Management and Innovation, Journal of
Accounting and Finance, and Labor Gazette received the
overall lowest quality rankings in the study.
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Cited to Citing Ratio
Information and knowledge flow between and among
academic journals provides an indication of the status of a
journal’s prestige within the scientific community (Johnson
& Podsakoff, 1994). This index differentiates between
journals that produce new knowledge and those journals
that house knowledge (Zinkhan & Leigh, 1999). The cited
to citing ratio is derived from dividing the number of times
an article has been cited in a specific time period by the
number of citations made in the article. Individual article
figures were aggregated and averaged at the journal level
across the years for the present investigation. A higher ratio
indicates the journal is a source of knowledge, whereas a
lower ratio indicates the journal is a knowledge warehouse.
Again, Journal of the Brazilian Economy ranked first on this
index, followed by Brazilian Journal of Political Economy
and Journal of Economics and Rural Sociology. These three
journals contributed most to supporting the creation of new
knowledge among the SciELO journals in the present study.
CRH Notebook, RAE Electronics, and Economic Studies
were the greatest storers of knowledge according to our
analysis.
Immediacy Factor
Urgency of a particular article is assessed using the immediacy factor. Essentially, the index reveals the immediate
relevance of a published research article relative to all
articles published and cataloged by an indexing service
(Garfield, 1979). The calculation is made by dividing the
number of citations made to a specific article in the year it
was published by the total number of articles published by
the indexing service for the same year (in this case, SciELO).
We averaged at the journal level for the 2003–2008 present
study period. Results of this analysis revealed that Latin
American Journal of Economics, Journal of Theoretical
and Applied Electronic Commerce Research, and Economic
Studies ranked first through third respectively on the
immediacy index. Twelve journals tied for the lowest ranked
with immediacy indexes of zero, indicating a potential lack
of immediate interest of the published research.
DISCUSSION
Since 1998, the SciELO database and electronic publishing
project has provided access to researchers in South American
countries and around the world to advance scientific inquiry
and the sharing and dissemination of knowledge to inform
and support scholarship in general and scholarship in business, economics, and administrative disciplines in particular.
Our objective in the present study was to assess the quality of
journals in the administrative sciences that are indexed in SciELO. Results of the analyses, using four standard measures,
frequently used in bibliometric studies, and one overall average ranking score provided insight on the impact and usage of
investigations published in South America. We subsequently
discuss our findings collectively. However, it should be noted
that the results may not generalize to all South American business and Economics journals, as we only investigated those
journals indexed in SciELO. Additionally, there are many
bibliometric indexes that can be used to gauge quality. We
selected four of the more commonly used in evaluation of
journals. Discussion of the results should be considered in
the context of these limitations.
Findings from our study are of interest to business, economics, and administrative science researchers and educators. First, the top three ranked journals were all published
by organizations in Brazil. Perhaps this indicates the level
of scientific inquiry in the country. Each of these journals,
Journal of the Economy of Brazil, Latin American Journal
of Economics, and Brazilian Journal of Political Economy,
has been publishing articles for more than 25 years. Over
the years, the sponsoring universities and research institutes
might have made financial and human resources investments
in the development of the journals and the process used to
review manuscripts for publication. The standards for acceptance may be more rigorous and thus higher impact articles
are published which in turn have greater impact on the academic community.
Second, we observed that the three lowest ranked journals, Journal of Technology Management and Innovation,
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SCIELO JOURNAL RANKINGS
Journal of Accounting and Finance, and Labor Gazette, were
focused on discipline-specific areas as opposed to the more
generally defined discipline of economics. In Latin America,
in general, and South America in particular, the discipline
of economics remains dominant among business-related
research. Indeed, many university schools of business are
named Facultad de Econom´ıa (College of Economics),
which may include such diverse fields as business, management information systems, and public administration. The
influence of the economics discipline and the availability
of outlets for publication may have an effect on researchers
to submit their manuscripts to journals whose mission is
to publish research from diverse fields under the rubric of
economics. Our analyses revealed that in general the more
technical and topic-specific the journal was, the lower the
individual and overall quality ranking. Note that the three
overall lowest ranked journals in our study were in the
fields of technology management, accounting and finance,
and labor.
Third, although not investigated directly, the higher
ranked SciELO administrative science journals may reflect
the relevance of topical areas studied to the needs of developing nations, regions, or the discipline in South America.
Knowledge gaps in specific content areas can affect the quantity of articles published in a specific field. These gaps may
also indicate the preference a journal has for certain topical
issues relative to other topical issues. Content analyses of the
SciELO journal articles would serve to identify if there are
particular areas of study that are found in the highest ranked
journals and not in the lower ranked journals. Moreover, the
degree to which the articles in the higher ranked journals
are being assigned as required class readings, or used in
dissertations, theses, and student research manuscripts, for
example, would provide information on how these journals
are connecting research with teaching and learning. Usage
of the present published research literature is a pedagogical method to provide students with resources when there
are not recently published textbooks available in the home
country language or are of high cost for the students and
faculty.
Future researchers would do well to utilize additional
bibliometric indexes of journal quality to confirm our findings regarding the rankings of SciELO business, economics,
and administrative science journals. Moreover, indexes and
journal quality change over time. Replication of the present
study’s results at periods of 3, 5, and 10 years, for example,
will identify how journal quality and impact are improved
or diminished. The production of and dissemination of quality research has important implications for how we advance
knowledge and transfer that knowledge for the advancement
of education and practice. The present study provides initial guidance to scholars and business educators about the
utility, quality, and impact of one set of South American
journals.
157
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was supported in part by grants from
DIRUDEC (project 208.97011-1), Chile, and BASALCONICYT (project FB0816), Chile.
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ISSN: 0883-2323 (Print) 1940-3356 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vjeb20
Ranking Business and Economics Journals in South
America Using the Scientific Electronic Library
Online (SciELO)
Jennifer K. Alexander , Lorena Pradenas , Víctor Parada & Robert F. Scherer
To cite this article: Jennifer K. Alexander , Lorena Pradenas , Víctor Parada & Robert F. Scherer
(2012) Ranking Business and Economics Journals in South America Using the Scientific
Electronic Library Online (SciELO), Journal of Education for Business, 87:3, 152-158, DOI:
10.1080/08832323.2011.582896
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08832323.2011.582896
Published online: 01 Feb 2012.
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Date: 11 January 2016, At: 21:59
JOURNAL OF EDUCATION FOR BUSINESS, 87: 152–158, 2012
C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Copyright
ISSN: 0883-2323 print / 1940-3356 online
DOI: 10.1080/08832323.2011.582896
Ranking Business and Economics Journals in South
America Using the Scientific Electronic Library
Online (SciELO)
Jennifer K. Alexander
Downloaded by [Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji] at 21:59 11 January 2016
Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Lorena Pradenas
Universidad de Concepci´on, Concepci´on, Chile
V´ıctor Parada
Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Santiago, Chile
Robert F. Scherer
Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Access to published research for knowledge creation and education in the administrative
science disciplines in South America has been enhanced since the introduction of the Scientific
Electronic Library Online (SciELO). Although SciELO has been available as an online journal
indexing and publication service since 1998, there have been no bibliometric investigations
conducted to identify the quality of journals available through the database. The authors used
4 common ranking measures and an overall index to evaluate the quality of SciELO journals.
Age and discipline of the journal seem to be important factors to support impact and ranking.
Implications of the findings for business school faculty, administrators, and researchers are
discussed.
Keywords: business research, journal ranking, SciELO, South America
A spate of articles in the academic literature attests to the importance of quality rankings for academic journals. Journal
articles establish the forum for communicating the latest scientific research and they are the most immediate and viable
means for vetting new ideas in a field and informing one’s
teaching (Clark, 1997). Academic journals are, thus, an essential resource for knowledge generation and dissemination.
In university settings, academic publication is considered the
gold standard for determining the strength of a scholar’s per¨
formance (Ozbilgin,
2009). Foundations evaluate the quality
of a scholar’s publications when reviewing proposals for research grant funding. In circumstances of tenure and career
advancement, journal rankings provide critical information
Correspondence should be addressed to Robert F. Scherer, Cleveland State University, Ahuja College of Business, 2121 Euclid Avenue,
Cleveland, OH 44115, USA. E-mail: r.scherer@csuohio.edu
for evaluating the strength of a faculty member’s contributions (Serneko, 2009).
Given the reliance on journal quality for knowledge
generation and career advancement, considerable attention
has been directed to the impact of journals published in the
United States and Northern Europe (Meneghini, Packer, &
Nassi-Cal`o, 2008). However, remarkably little analysis has
been directed to journals that represent scholarship outside
of the developed world. This difference can be attributed
to an unfortunate reality: Knowledge is a commodity that
has flowed from the industrialized world to the developing
world such that the United States, the European Union, and
Japan account for 78.3% of the world’s scientific research
(European Commission, 2003; Salager-Meyer, 2008). The
reasons for this disparity in scientific output can be attributed
to a number of mutually reinforcing barriers for scholarship
offered by developing nations. They are most notably,
language and resources.
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SCIELO JOURNAL RANKINGS
The lingua franca for scholarly publication is English.
Researchers from developing nations have been required to
develop the language skills necessary to publish their research in English and preferably in Thomson Institute for
Scientific Information (ISI) quality journals or risk falling
on the periphery of research in their fields. A variety of
studies reveal that scientific publications among a nation’s
science community are highly correlated with proficiency in
English (Man, Weinkauf, Tsang, & Sin, 2004; Meneghini
et al., 2008; Vasconcelos, Sorenson, & Leta, 2007; Victora
& Moreira, 2006). Additionally, scholars in the developing
world experience considerable difficulty securing access to
up-to-date information necessary to generate research. Journals are costly and there are vast differences in access to
printed materials as well as Internet resources, depending
on the subscriptions of academic institutions. Lack of access
to personal computers or Internet further limits the ability
of scholars to submit manuscripts electronically and isolates
them from the ongoing research dialogue. The vast differential in access to information shapes not only the production
of knowledge, but also participation in the social world of
scholars (Arunachalam, 2003).
JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS IN LATIN AMERICA
Recent developments hold the promise of leveling the playing field and advancing scholarship in developing nations in
significant respects, most notably the development of electronic information and open access journals. The advent of
electronic information has dramatically reduced the costs
associated with distribution and dissemination of information. As the costs associated with journal access continues to
plummet through the myriad of rapidly arising networks promoting open electronic access, researchers are able to acquire
the most present research. In recent years, the combination
of technological advancements and institutional efforts has
enhanced access to information through the creation of free
Internet archives.
One of the more celebrated examples of cooperative electronic publishing is the Scientific Electronic Library Online
(SciELO), established in Brazil in 1998. SciELO is a network of 15 national and two thematic open access journal
collections that include over a dozen countries, three continents, and more than 600 titles (Packer, 2009). The SciELO journal collections include the best journals published
in Ibero-America, including Latin America, the Caribbean,
Portugal, and Spain. Packer noted that the “monthly average
of more than 12 million articles accessed per month” places
SciELO among the “top-accessed, research-related websites
in Ibero-America” (p. 112). The widespread recognition that
scholarship in the developing world was lost science, seldom read or cited, was a critical event that contributed to
the establishment of SciELO (Gibbs, 1995). In effect, Sci-
153
ELO represents an effort to augment visibility, quality, and
quantity of scholarship focused on issues of relevance to
the South.
SciELO fosters scientific productivity around priorities
of relevance to developing nations, aggregating and advancing knowledge that is contextualized. Journals reflect the
priorities of “networks of cultural, educational and political
institutions” and their respective “metropolitan, national and
international contexts” (Crysler, 2003, p. 189). As a result,
the topics and themes that are salient in international journals
differ from those that hold sway for a region. Open access
journal networks create the opportunity to shift the research
agenda to particular needs. Although developing nations put
a high premium on technological advancement, scientific
research has been a lower priority and there is a high correlation between technological development and science (King,
2004, Man et al., 2004; Salager-Meyer, 2008).
Moreover, journal articles published in a language that is
readily accessible expand access to the conversations where
research is digested and built upon with stakeholders (e.g.,
policymakers, private sector industry, government officials;
Nerad, 2010; Salager-Meyer, 2008). One of the most important trends of the past decade is that knowledge production has become a process that involves multiple actors,
including universities, industry, business, and governments
(Nerad; Gibbons et al., 1994). As the generation of knowledge is increasingly linked through outcome measures to
regional stakeholders, there is a need to be able to communicate research findings to this regional audience and
this need has fostered the need for regionalized scholarly
networks (Nerad).
The present research comprises the first bibliometric
analysis of research journals in the area of business and
economics for Ibero-America. Other analyses have been
conducted on journals in the area of psychiatry and clinical
psychology (Quevedo-Blasco, Dias-Piedra, & Guglielmi,
2010), general publication and citation patterns within
Latin American and Caribbean journals (Collazo-Reyes,
Luna-Morales, Russell, & P´erez-Ang´on, 2008), and in other
nations, for example, the bibliometric study of computer
science in Malaysia (Bakri & Willett, 2009). Results of
studies confirm the trends of a knowledge gap between
developing and developed nations, and manifest as little
intercitation (Collazo-Reyes et al.), scholars from the
developing countries more frequently citing scholarship
published in English, and research from developing nations
less often cited by scholars from the North (Bakri & Willett).
Given the importance of published scholarship in tenure and
promotion decisions as well as the relationship between re¨
search and teaching (Clark, 1997; Ozbilgin,
2009; Serenko,
2009), the present study on ranking SciELO journals
provides insight for faculty, business school administrators,
and review committees with respect the value and impact of
research.
154
J. K. ALEXANDER ET AL.
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IDENTIFYING THE JOURNALS IN THE
SciELO DATABASE
To identify the population of business and economics journals in the SciELO database we searched for all journals
coded as accepting manuscripts in business, economics, or
administrative science between the years 2003–2008. This
was necessary, as there is overlap between business and economics disciplines throughout South America. Depending on
the country, business research may be labeled as economics
and vice versa. Public administration is also a combination of
business and economics in South America, so we broadened
the search to include any journals dealing with these three
topical areas. Additionally, journals included in the present
study had to be publishing articles for at least two years
(see subsequent explanation in Citation Analysis and Ranking the Journals), and be published by an organization in
South America.
The SciELO database contains a total of 766 journals (Scientific Electronic Library Online, 2010). Our search yielded
22 journals that met the previous inclusion criteria. Table 1
details the characteristics of the 22 journals comprising our
study of rankings. Review of the descriptive information revealed that the greatest number of journals was published by
TABLE 1
Characteristics of the Journals
Characteristic
Country
Brazil
Chile
Argentina
Venezuela
Sponsor
University center
Research institute or center of research
Association or independent council
Year of first edition in SciELO
1997–2000
2001–2005
2006–2010
Number of years published
20 or more
10–19
5–9
1–4
Language(s)
Portuguese
Spanish
Spanish, English
Spanish, Portuguese, English
Spanish, Portuguese, English, French
Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, German
Number of indexes
1–6
7–13
aRounded
to the nearest whole number (N = 22).
na
%
63.64
18.18
9.09
9.09
45.45
22.73
31.82
3
12
7
13.64
54.55
31.81
45.00
36.00
9.00
9.00
45.45
27.27
9.09
9.09
4.55
4.55
81.82
18.18
organizations in Brazil (63.64%). The majority of the journals were sponsored by universities (45.45%), with the first
volume being cataloged on the SciELO system between 2001
and 2005. However, it should be noted that the range of first
volume publication was from 1947 (Journal of the Economy of Brazil) through 2006 (Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research). Portuguese was the
most frequent language required by the journals for publication of research (45.45%), although some journals accepted
manuscripts for submission in Spanish, English, French, and
German. In addition to being indexed in SciELO, the majority of journals included in the present study were indexed by
1–6 other indexing services (81.82%; e.g., ISI).
CITATION ANALYSIS AND RANKING THE
JOURNALS
With the 22 journals for inclusion identified, we turned our
attention to constructing indices for ranking. We followed
the method used by Katerattanakul, Han, and Hong (2003),
which objectifies the ranking process. Rather than utilize perceptions of journal quality, we used four quantitative measures to assess journal quality rank and then computed an
average across the four measures to obtain an average journal rank for each individual journal, which resulted in the
journals included in our study being ranked from 1 (highest
ranked) to 22 (lowest ranked). The four measures included
annual mean citations per article, present article impact, cited
to citing ratio, and the immediacy factor. These four citation
analysis measures are commonly used as bibliometric indicators of journal quality (Garfield, 1979). Previously it was
noted that for a journal to be included in our study it had to be
publishing articles for at least two years between the period
2003 and 2008. We used this decision rule, similar to Katerattanakul et al., to account for the lag between publication of
an article and citation of the article by other researchers in
their own research. Table 2 shows how each journal scored
on each of the four measures and the rank for the journal on
the individual measures.
Annual Mean Citations per Article
Published scholarly research is based on providing support and justification for arguments made in a manuscript
(Garfield, 1979). The annual mean citations per article indicates the degree to which an article is utilized by other
researchers in supporting their own investigations. This measure was constructed by dividing the number of annual citations per article by the number of years since the article’s
initial publication and then averaging across all articles in a
particular journal for the years covered by the present study.
The measure controls for the number of years elapsed since
publication of the article, reducing the effect of time. Annual
mean citations per article ranged from 0 to 1.85. A higher
number of annual mean citations per article indicates that
SCIELO JOURNAL RANKINGS
155
TABLE 2
Indices of Journal Quality and Ranking
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Journal name
Revista Brasileira de Economia (Brazil)
Brazilian Journal of Economics
Cuadernos de Econom´ıa (Brazil)
Latin American Journal of Economics
Revista de Economia Pol´ıtica (Brazil)
Brazilian Journal of Political Economy
Economia Aplicada (Brazil)
Applied Economics
Nova Economia (Brazil)
The New Economy
Revista de Administrac¸a˜ o Contemporˆanea (Brazil)
Journal of Contemporary Management
Revista de Economia e Sociologia Rural (Brazil)
Journal of Economics and Rural Sociology
Revista de Administrac¸a˜ o P´ublica (Brazil)
Journal of Public Administration
Revista de Economia Contemporˆanea (Brazil)
Journal of Contemporary Economics
RAE Electrˆonica (Brazil)
RAE Electronics
S˜ao Paulo em Perspectiva (Brazil)
Sao Paulo in Perspective
Investigaci´on y Postgrado (Venezuela)
Research and Graduate
Economia e Sociedade (Brazil)
Economy and Society
Estudios de Econom´ıa (Chile)
Economic Studies
Caderno CRH (Brazil)
CRH Notebook
Estudos Econˆomicos (S˜ao Paulo) (Brazil)
Economic Studies
Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic
Commerce Researcha (Chile)
Estudios y Perspectivas en Turismo (Argentina)
Tourism Studies and Perspectives
Documentos y Aportes en Administraci´on P´ublica
y Gesti´on Estatal (Argentina)
Documents and Contributions in Public
Administration and State
Gaceta Laboral (Venezuela)
Labor Gazette
Revista Contabilidade & Financ¸as (Brazil)
Journal of Accounting and Finance
Journal of Technology Management and Innovation
(Chile)a
Annual mean
citations per
article
Present article
impact
Cited to citing
ratio
Immediacy
factor
1.85
(1)
0.11
(1)
0.07
(1)
.01
(8)
3.0
(1)
1947
0.90
(3)
0.04
(7)
0.03
(4)
.18
(1)
3.6
(2)
1963
1.14
(2)
0.08
(3)
0.05
(2)
.02
(6)
5.0
(3)
1981
0.62
(7)
0.08
(2)
0.02
(8)
.02
(5)
6.2
(4)
1997
0.81
(4)
0.05
(6)
0.03
(6)
.00
(11)
6.6
(5)
1990
0.52
(9)
0.05
(5)
0.01
(9)
.01
(10)
7.0
(6)
1997
0.61
(8)
0.04
(9)
0.03
(3)
.00
(11)
8.2
(7)
1962
0.79
(5)
0.02
(11)
0.02
(7)
.02
(7)
8.6
(8)
1967
0.41
(11)
0.06
(4)
0.01
(10)
.00
(11)
8.8
(9)
1997
0.28
(12)
0.04
(8)
0.01
(14)
.00
(11)
9.2
(10)
2002
0.63
(6)
0.04
(10)
0.04
(5)
.01
(9)
9.4
(11)
1987
0.22
(15)
0.00
(13)
0.01
(12)
.00
(11)
11.2
(12)
1985
0.44
(10)
0.00
(13)
0.01
(11)
.00
(11)
12.0
(13)
1992
0.24
(14)
0.00
(13)
0.01
(13)
.06
(3)
12.4
(14)
1973
0.25
(13)
0.00
(13)
0.01
(15)
.00
(11)
13.2
(15)
1987
0.00
(22)
0.00
(13)
0.00
(22)
.02
(4)
13.6
(16)
1971
0.11
(17)
0.00
(13)
0.00
(17)
.08
(2)
14.0
(17)
2006
0.13
(16)
0.02
(12)
0.01
(16)
.00
(11)
14.2
(18)
1991
0.04
(19)
0.00
(13)
0.00
(20)
.00
(11)
14.8
(19)
2001
0.04
(20)
0.00
(13)
0.00
(18)
.00
(11)
16.0
(20)
1995
0.04
(18)
0.00
(13)
0.00
(19)
.00
(11)
16.2
(21)
1989
0.01
(21)
0.00
(13)
0.00
(21)
.00
(11)
17.6
(22)
2005
Average
ranking score
Year
established
Note. Bracketed numbers indicate a journal’s ranking for the specific index. English names of journals provided in italics.
title is only in English.
aJournal
the research is utilized to a greater or lesser extent. In order,
Journal of the Economy of Brazil, Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, and Latin American Journal of Economics had
the greatest number of citations per article. Journals with the
lowest number of citations per article included The Economic
Studies, Journal of Technology Management and Innovation,
and Labor Gazette. For this measure, journals in the field of
economics ranked the highest.
Present Article Impact
Importance of an article can be gauged by assessing the
impact the research has had on subsequent published
research (Garfield, 1979). In the SciELO database, a
journal’s impact factor for the year of interest is calculated
based on the number of citations in the previous two years
made to all articles in a particular journal divided by the
156
J. K. ALEXANDER ET AL.
total number of articles published in that two year base
period. Impact factors for the 2003–2008 period under study
were averaged. Higher impact factors indicate a journal has
greater influence on subsequent research. Journals with the
strongest present article impact were Journal of the Economy
of Brazil, Brazilian Journal of Applied Economics, and
Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, respectively. Ten
of the journals tied for having present article impact factors
of zero indicating their relative lack of influence on the
business, economics, and administrative science literature.
These 10 journals spanned the discipline-specific areas.
Average Ranking Score
Our final objective was to obtain an overall ranking of each
of the 22 journals included in the study. We averaged the
rankings for each journal on the individual indexes to yield
an average ranking score. This measure indicates the quality
ranking of the journals in comparison among themselves.
In order, Journal of the Economy of Brazil, Latin American
Journal of Economics, and Brazilian Journal of Political
Economy were the ranked first, second, and third. Journal
of Technology Management and Innovation, Journal of
Accounting and Finance, and Labor Gazette received the
overall lowest quality rankings in the study.
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Cited to Citing Ratio
Information and knowledge flow between and among
academic journals provides an indication of the status of a
journal’s prestige within the scientific community (Johnson
& Podsakoff, 1994). This index differentiates between
journals that produce new knowledge and those journals
that house knowledge (Zinkhan & Leigh, 1999). The cited
to citing ratio is derived from dividing the number of times
an article has been cited in a specific time period by the
number of citations made in the article. Individual article
figures were aggregated and averaged at the journal level
across the years for the present investigation. A higher ratio
indicates the journal is a source of knowledge, whereas a
lower ratio indicates the journal is a knowledge warehouse.
Again, Journal of the Brazilian Economy ranked first on this
index, followed by Brazilian Journal of Political Economy
and Journal of Economics and Rural Sociology. These three
journals contributed most to supporting the creation of new
knowledge among the SciELO journals in the present study.
CRH Notebook, RAE Electronics, and Economic Studies
were the greatest storers of knowledge according to our
analysis.
Immediacy Factor
Urgency of a particular article is assessed using the immediacy factor. Essentially, the index reveals the immediate
relevance of a published research article relative to all
articles published and cataloged by an indexing service
(Garfield, 1979). The calculation is made by dividing the
number of citations made to a specific article in the year it
was published by the total number of articles published by
the indexing service for the same year (in this case, SciELO).
We averaged at the journal level for the 2003–2008 present
study period. Results of this analysis revealed that Latin
American Journal of Economics, Journal of Theoretical
and Applied Electronic Commerce Research, and Economic
Studies ranked first through third respectively on the
immediacy index. Twelve journals tied for the lowest ranked
with immediacy indexes of zero, indicating a potential lack
of immediate interest of the published research.
DISCUSSION
Since 1998, the SciELO database and electronic publishing
project has provided access to researchers in South American
countries and around the world to advance scientific inquiry
and the sharing and dissemination of knowledge to inform
and support scholarship in general and scholarship in business, economics, and administrative disciplines in particular.
Our objective in the present study was to assess the quality of
journals in the administrative sciences that are indexed in SciELO. Results of the analyses, using four standard measures,
frequently used in bibliometric studies, and one overall average ranking score provided insight on the impact and usage of
investigations published in South America. We subsequently
discuss our findings collectively. However, it should be noted
that the results may not generalize to all South American business and Economics journals, as we only investigated those
journals indexed in SciELO. Additionally, there are many
bibliometric indexes that can be used to gauge quality. We
selected four of the more commonly used in evaluation of
journals. Discussion of the results should be considered in
the context of these limitations.
Findings from our study are of interest to business, economics, and administrative science researchers and educators. First, the top three ranked journals were all published
by organizations in Brazil. Perhaps this indicates the level
of scientific inquiry in the country. Each of these journals,
Journal of the Economy of Brazil, Latin American Journal
of Economics, and Brazilian Journal of Political Economy,
has been publishing articles for more than 25 years. Over
the years, the sponsoring universities and research institutes
might have made financial and human resources investments
in the development of the journals and the process used to
review manuscripts for publication. The standards for acceptance may be more rigorous and thus higher impact articles
are published which in turn have greater impact on the academic community.
Second, we observed that the three lowest ranked journals, Journal of Technology Management and Innovation,
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SCIELO JOURNAL RANKINGS
Journal of Accounting and Finance, and Labor Gazette, were
focused on discipline-specific areas as opposed to the more
generally defined discipline of economics. In Latin America,
in general, and South America in particular, the discipline
of economics remains dominant among business-related
research. Indeed, many university schools of business are
named Facultad de Econom´ıa (College of Economics),
which may include such diverse fields as business, management information systems, and public administration. The
influence of the economics discipline and the availability
of outlets for publication may have an effect on researchers
to submit their manuscripts to journals whose mission is
to publish research from diverse fields under the rubric of
economics. Our analyses revealed that in general the more
technical and topic-specific the journal was, the lower the
individual and overall quality ranking. Note that the three
overall lowest ranked journals in our study were in the
fields of technology management, accounting and finance,
and labor.
Third, although not investigated directly, the higher
ranked SciELO administrative science journals may reflect
the relevance of topical areas studied to the needs of developing nations, regions, or the discipline in South America.
Knowledge gaps in specific content areas can affect the quantity of articles published in a specific field. These gaps may
also indicate the preference a journal has for certain topical
issues relative to other topical issues. Content analyses of the
SciELO journal articles would serve to identify if there are
particular areas of study that are found in the highest ranked
journals and not in the lower ranked journals. Moreover, the
degree to which the articles in the higher ranked journals
are being assigned as required class readings, or used in
dissertations, theses, and student research manuscripts, for
example, would provide information on how these journals
are connecting research with teaching and learning. Usage
of the present published research literature is a pedagogical method to provide students with resources when there
are not recently published textbooks available in the home
country language or are of high cost for the students and
faculty.
Future researchers would do well to utilize additional
bibliometric indexes of journal quality to confirm our findings regarding the rankings of SciELO business, economics,
and administrative science journals. Moreover, indexes and
journal quality change over time. Replication of the present
study’s results at periods of 3, 5, and 10 years, for example,
will identify how journal quality and impact are improved
or diminished. The production of and dissemination of quality research has important implications for how we advance
knowledge and transfer that knowledge for the advancement
of education and practice. The present study provides initial guidance to scholars and business educators about the
utility, quality, and impact of one set of South American
journals.
157
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was supported in part by grants from
DIRUDEC (project 208.97011-1), Chile, and BASALCONICYT (project FB0816), Chile.
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