Ranking Journals In Economics, Management And Political Science By Social Choice Theory Methods

Data on economic, management and political science journals are used to produce quantitative estimates of (in)consistency of evaluations based on seven popular bibliometric indicators. This paper proposes a new approach to the construction of aggregate journal rankings: aggregation is considered to be a multicriteria decision problem and ordinal ranking methods from social choice theory are employed to solve it. We apply either a direct ranking method based on majority rule (e.g. the Copeland rule, the Markovian method) or a multistage procedure of selection and exclusion of the best journals, as determined by a majority rule-based social choice solution concept (tournament solution), such as the uncovered set and the minimal externally stable set. We use the same method to analyze correlations of rankings and demonstrate that aggregate rankings reduce the number of contradictions and represent the set of single-indicator-based rankings better than any of the seven rankings themselves.