Don't always judge an article by its cover: An examination of proxies for journal impact and citations in entrepreneurship

Abstract

In many academic circles, promotion and tenure decisions are often driven by the quality of the candidate's research portfolio. In entrepreneurship, as in other disciplines, we tend to judge the quality and impact of our research based on publication in a select few top journals. In our paper, we investigate the incorrect inferences that result from using Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and other rankings as proxies to assess an article's scholarly quality and impact. In doing so, we hope to better understand any discrepancies between journal quality as measured by these proxies and individual article citation rates within both top and non-top entrepreneurship journals. Our results, based upon the average number of citations, show roughly 61% of the top four journals being misidentified as high quality (Type 2 error) and 22% of the remaining journal articles being misidentified as not high quality (Type 1 error). We illustrate the variability within the top entrepreneurship journals that further reinforces the importance of evaluating each article based on its individual merits rather than relying solely on proxies of quality. As such, we avoid neglecting the potential impact and value of articles that may not conform to traditional measures of quality.