Citation-Capture Rates by Economic Journals:Do they Differ from Other Disciplines and Does it Matter?

In this paper we compare the rate of citation-capture across the social sciences and sciences, with particular attention paid to economics and its border disciplines generally located in Schools of Business. We also explore citation time-flow differences between a number of leading journals in economics and a representative science category, and between higher and lower ranked economics journals. Our findings suggest that short-term citation counting, either directly or indirectly, for purposes of generating impact factors and the like, introduces a bias in favour of the sciences over the social sciences. This is in addition to the well-known differences in the absolute number of cites between these discipline categories over the short and long term. Our findings call into question the usefulness of citation analysis in national research assessment exercises that concentrate on recent research contributions. Furthermore, within economics, we found short-term impact factors to be systematically biased in favour of lower ranked journals.