The impact of journal editors in academic publications: A stochastic frontier analysis

Abstract

Since the task of deciding whether a research work is published or not is carried out by journal editors, the composition and attributes of editorial board members are relevant variables to be investigated. In particular, when trying to understand if the scientific knowledge shared with the world is impacted by other factors instead of being judged solely by the quality and content of the research. Hence, this research analyses the composition of editorial teams from 27 journals in three main areas – Economics & Econometrics, Finance, and Business & International Management - and their influence on the efficiency of such journals. After collecting the data required to perform this study, the composition and characteristics of editorial board members, as well as an analysis aiming to identify patterns between editors’ characteristics and the context and impact of scientific publication journals were carried out. Some of the data collected about the editors and journals for the analyses were the gender, geography, affiliated institution, publisher’s categories, position in those categories, H-index, and SCImago Journal Rank. The gathered data was then used to build a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) model to analyze journals’ efficiency, as input. The SFA allows us to develop a multi-input single-output scenario. Primary findings suggest that the performance of research journals’ is influenced by the size of the editorial board, gender, and location but not by the performance of each editor as an individual. There is an overwhelming presence of US-based, male, and academic editors among the editorial boards as well as US institutions represented by scholars. The results show that economics and finance journals tend to be more efficient than business journals and that the research industry, despite having a small margin to improve, appears to be efficient.