Fifty years of The Financial Review: A bibliometric overview

• Published date: 01 February 2020
• Author: H. Kent Baker,Satish Kumar,Debidutta Pattnaik
• Date: 01 February 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fire.12228

DOI: 10.1111/fire.12228

INVITED ARTICLE

Fifty years of The Financial Review: A bibliometric

overview

H. Kent Baker1Satish Kumar2Debidutta Pattnaik2

1Department of Finance and Real Estate,

KogodSchool of Business, American University,

Washington,DC

2Department of Management Studies, Malaviya

National Institute of Technology,Jaipur, India

Correspondence

H.Kent Baker, Department of Finance and Real

Estate,Kogod School of Business, American

University,4400 Massachusetts Avenue,NW,

Washington,DC 20016.

Email:kbaker@american.edu

Abstract

The Financial Review (FR) is a highly regarded journal publishing

original empirical, theoretical, and methodological research in all

areas of financial economics. It celebrated its golden jubilee year in

2018.Using bibliometric techniques, we analyze the journal’s impact,

prominent topics, most prolific authors, and their affiliated institu-

tions and countries. Our analysis also identifies the most often cited

articles at different points in the journal’s history.Using textual data

analytics, we identify the most frequent themes discussed between

1969 and 2018 by decade.

KEYWORDS

bibliometrics, Financial Review, Scopus, text analytics with

VOSviewer

1INTRODUCTION

The Financial Review (FR) publishes peer-reviewed, original research covering all areas of financial economics. It is the

official journal of the Eastern FinanceAssociation (EFA). Srini Krishnamurthy and Richard Warr of North Carolina State

University are currently FR’s editors.1According to the Chartered Association of Business Schools’ (CABS) Academic

Journal Guide (AJG) 2018, FR ranks 17 among the 109 finance journals listed. It is rated a “3” in CABS’s AJG 2018,2

indicating that FR publishes original and well-executedresearch. The rating process supporting the AJG list involves a

stringent set of procedures that not only involves metrics but also reflects the views of field experts.3FR is rated“A,”

the second highest quality rank,in the 2019 Australian Business Deans Council’s (ABDC) Journal Quality List. FR ranks

among the top quartile of the 2,682 journals featured in the list.4FR is indexedin Scopus, Web of Science, and Emerging

Science Citation Index.

In recognition of FR’s recent 50th anniversary, this study provides a retrospective. It offers an analysis of the

publication trends and citation structure of FR articles, its most prolific authors, and their affiliated institutions and

1Forinformation about the editorial board, refer to https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/15406288/homepage/editorialboard.html.

2ForCABS’s AJG 2018 ranking of journals refer to https://charteredabs.org/academic-journal-guide-2018-view/.

3Forinformation about the rating process in AJG 2018, refer to CABS’s A JG 2018 methodology at https://charteredabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/

AJG2018-Methodology.pdf.

4Formore information about the 2019 ABDC Journal Quality List, refer to https://abdc.edu.au/research/abdc-journal-list/.

Financial Review.2020;55:7–24. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/fire c

2020 The Eastern Finance Association 7

8BAKER ET AL.

countries. Using textual data analytics, we highlight the most frequent topics discussed overFR’s first 50 years divided

into five 10-year periods. Weaddress the following questions relating to FR between 1969 and 2018:

•What is FR’s publication trend and citation structure during its first 50 years?

•What is FR’s distribution of co-authorship?

•What are the most highly cited articles at different periods in the journal’s history?

•Who are the top FR authors and their affiliated institutions and countries between 1969 and 2018?

•What are the top institutions affiliated with FR authors over the journal’s life?

•Which countries are most often affiliated with FR authors during the study period?

•Has the geographical distribution of authors changed during FR’s first 50 years?

•In what journals are FR articles most often cited?

•How has research in terms of the finance topics covered evolvedover the journal’s history?

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the study’s methodology.Section 3 presents

the descriptive results and discusses the evolutionof FR themes by decade. Section 4 concludes.

2METHOD

Toaccess the bibliometric data, we use the Scopus database, which is one of the largest multidisciplinary databases of

peer-reviewedworks in the social sciences (Bartol, Budimir, Dekleva-Smrekar, Pusnik, & Juznic, 2014; Norris & Oppen-

heim, 2007). Scopus is widely recognized as a major source for quantitative analysis (Durán-Sánchez, de la Cruz Del

Río-Rama, Álvarez-García, & García-Vélez, 2019; Guerrero-Baena, Gómez-Limón, & Cardozo, 2014; Silveira& Zilber,

2017). Including bibliometric data from sources outside of Scopus could potentially alter the results.

We present a bibliometric overview of FR in terms of descriptive and content analysis. Our descriptive analysis

includes indicators such as the number of publications, citations, and citations per publication. We use the h-index

to present FR’s productivity and impact (Hirsch, 2005). The h-index is an author-level metric that attempts to mea-

sure both a scholar’s productivity and citation impact of the publications. According to Callon, Courtial, Turner,and

Bauin (1983), co-occurrence of keywords exposesthe conceptual structure latent in the literature. For content analy-

sis, we use text-mining in VOSviewer to identify the important themes contained in FR titles. VOSvieweris extremely

useful in mapping analysis.5It uses standardized weights such as the number of occurrences and total link strength

to denote the relevance and strength of a relation in a nodal network involving authors, keywords, institutions, or

countries (van Eck & Waltman, 2017). Gephi uses similar measures but offers additional tools for statistical analysis

(Bastian, Heymann, & Jacomy,2009).6We extract the network file consisting of frequently appearing terms in FR titles

using VOSviewer and visualize these terms in Gephi (Donthu, Kumar,& Pattnaik, 2020).

3RESULTS

The Scopus database shows that FR published 2,155 documents between 1969 and 2018.7Removing duplicates and

articles without author information reduced the number to 2,125. According to Scopus, articles in peer-reviewed

5Formore details on the text mining and mapping analysis followed in VOSviewer,see https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/eebd/8c9e1dce3656de1d6a2c92fa26

d82087447e.pdf.

6www.gephi.org

7For definitions of documents covered in the Scopus database, see the Scopus Content Coverage Guide available at https://www.elsevier.com/__data/

assets/pdf_file/0007/69451/0597-Scopus-Content-Coverage-Guide-US-LETTER-v4-HI-singles-no-ticks.pdf.