The measurement of production efficiency in scientific journals through stochastic frontier analysis models: Application to quantitative economics journals

Abstract

The importance of a scientific journal is usually established by considering the number of citations received by the papers that the journal publishes. In this way, the number of cita- tions received by a scientific journal can be considered as a measure of the total production of the journal. In this paper, in order to obtain measures of the efficiency in the produc- tion process, the approach provided by stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) is considered, and econometric models are proposed. These models estimate a frontier production, which is the maximum achievable number of citations to the journal based on its resources. The effi- ciency can then be measured by considering the difference between the actual production and the estimated frontier. This approach is applied to the measurement of the produc- tive efficiency of the journals of the JCR social sciences edition database, which belong simultaneously to the areas of “economics” and “social sciences, mathematical methods”