ART: Redman, A Normalized Citation Analysis of Real Estate Journals

[Gretchen Whitney]

SUMMARY OF
A NORMALIZED CITATION ANALYSIS OF REAL ESTATE JOURNALS
BY
Arnold L. Redman, Herman Manakyan and John R. Tanner
Published in Real Estate Economics 27:1, Spring 1999, 169-182.

Arnold L. Redman
School of Business Administration
The University of Tennessee - Martin
Martin, TN 38238

Author e-mail:  aredman at utm.edu

This article presents a citation analysis and ranking of journals in the
academic field of real estate and includes journals in fields related to
real estate, specifically economics and finance.  There are several
reasons that a citation analysis is significant to academics:  it provides
information about the important outlets for faculty research, it provides
information for the tenure and promotion process, it provides information
for librarians as to which journals are the leaders in a field, and a
citation analysis can reveal trends in the importance of journals over
time that can be useful in assessing the impact of specific
journals.  Citation analysis has been applied in several fields of
business including accounting, management information systems and
finance.  However, this article is the first to apply a normalized
citation analysis using an exponential function to journals in the field
of real estate.  The article provides an adjusted citation analysis of
journals in real estate, finance, and economics as well as evaluates the
changes in citations over the period 1990 through 1995. The analysis looks
at peer-reviewed journals and at practitioner-oriented journals.

The methodology consisted of  examining the reference lists of a base set
of journals for the years 1990 through 1995.  Four journals were included
in the base set consisting of the Journal of Real Estate Research, Real
Estate Economics, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics and The
Appraisal Journal.  These journals were selected based on a review of
previous research which indicated, mainly from surveys of academics in the
field of real estate, the important journals.  The base set of journals
includes articles that focus on academic and practitioner audiences in
real estate.

After examining the reference list of the above journals, the number of
citations for each journal was totaled from the reference lists in the
articles in the base set.  This provided the initial rankings of journals
with the rankings based on the number of citations garnered by
each.  Overall, there were 13,332 articles cited from 662 different
journals over the period.  The article reports the rankings of only 54
journals which had at least 24 citations from 1990 through 1995.

The rankings were then normalized to eliminate three potential
biases:  high rankings due to self-citations, bias in rankings due to
journal size, and rankings due to the life span or longevity of a
journal. Self-citations, those in each of the journals in the base set
cited by articles published in those journals, were eliminated.  Journal
size, or number of articles published in a journal, was adjusted by
dividing the number of articles published by a journal into the total
number of citations published by a journal during the study
period.  Longevity, or the number of years a journal has been in
publication, was adjusted through application of an exponential
factor.  Journals will be cited in more recently published articles; the
Social Science Citation Index has determined that the half-life of
articles in finance and economics is 6.9 years.  That is, articles are
cited less often,  the longer the journal issue has been
outstanding.   Citations were also adjusted for a combination of size and
longevity of the journals.

The results indicate several interesting findings.  Real Estate Economics,
the first academic journal in the field of real estate, was ranked first
in all cases, with and without adjustments for longevity, size, or
both.  The largest number of citations were in journals outside of real
estate, in the major journals of finance and economics such as Journal of
Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Land Economics and Journal of
Urban Economics.  It may be concluded that the patterns of citations
reflect the wide range of outlets that academics in real estate have used
in the past to publish their research.  Until fairly recently the main
sources of publications in real estate have been in economics and finance
journals reflecting the limited number of academic real estate
publications available.

There have been several changes in real estate journal citations from 1990
through 1995.  The Journal of Real Estate Research and the Journal of Real
Estate Finance and Economics have steadily moved upward in their rankings
among real estate journals.  Also, the highly ranked real estate journals
noted in previous studies were not cited as often as the real estate
journals in this study, indicating a shift in where academic articles were
being published during the study period.

A temporal analysis was performed on the citation patterns indicating
further movement in the publication patterns in academic real
estate.  Over the study period, citations had shifted from economics and
practitioner-oriented journals (such as Journal of Urban Economics, Land
Economics, Real Estate Issues and Real Estate Finance) to the
academic-oriented real estate journals, specifically the Journal of Real
Estate Research (JRER) and the Journal of Real Estate Finance and
Economics (JREFE).  JREFE moved from being a new journal to one of the
most frequently cited journals.  JRER gained in citation frequency over
the study period as well. As time passes and more academic real estate
journals are launched, it can be expected that increasingly citations will
include those journals rather than the traditional economic and
practitioner journals that have served as outlets for real estate
research.


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Gretchen Whitney, PhD                                     tel 423.974.7919
School of Information Sciences                            fax 423.974.4967
University of Tennessee, Knoxville TN 37996 USA           gwhitney at utk.edu
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