Relationships between expert ratings of business/economics journals and key citation metrics: The impact of size-independence, citing-journal weighting, and subject-area normalization

This study uses data for >3300 business and economics journals to explore the relationships between 5 subjective (expert) journal ratings and 10 citation metrics including 5IF (5-year Impact Factor), Article Influence (AI) score, CiteScore, Eigenfactor, Impact per Publication, SJR, and SNIP. Overall, AI and SJR are the citation metrics most closely related to the expert journal ratings. Comparisons of paired citation metrics that are similar in all but a single key characteristic confirm that expert journal ratings are more closely related to size-independent citation metrics than to size-dependent metrics, more closely related to weighted metrics than to unweighted metrics, and more closely related to normalized metrics than to non-normalized metrics. These results, which are consistent across the 5 expert ratings, suggest that evaluators consider the average impact of an article in each journal rather than the total impact of the journal as a whole, that they give more credit for citations in high-impact journals than for citations in lesser journals, and that they assess each journal's relative standing within its own field or subfield rather than its broader scholarly impact. No single citation metric is a good substitute for any of the expert ratings considered here.