Published, Not Perished, but Has Anybody Read It? Citation Success of Finance Research Articles

Abstract

Citation counts are widely used in academia in hiring, tenure, promotion, salary increases, merit pay as well as to rank departments, journals and authors. However, no previous study examined the factors that influence citations in finance journals. This article examines how the number of citations is affected by authors’ collaboration, advertising and ‘salesmanship’ efforts, journals rank, article placement in the journal, and authors’ experience. We employ 16 years of data and use the Tobit model to study the number of citations. Also, we use the hazard model to estimate the probability of an article being cited for the first time. The empirical results show significant relation between the number of citations and the ranking of authors’ university, placement of an article in a journal, the length of an article, and the number of references included but no significant effect of collaboration, grant support, and the number of presentations and acknowledgments. Additionally, we conclude that it is important to use a long time series data to analyse citations in finance.