Coordinated journals, concentrated networks and citation growth: Evidence from finance

This paper introduces and tests two hypotheses: formally and openly coordinating journals boosts their impact factors; and journal coordination combined with highly-concentrated editorial and author networks augments this effect. We use Scopus and Scimago citation data and PubPeer data to proxy journals associated with highly-concentrated editorial and author networks. Focusing on the similarities and differences between twenty-six top finance journals, before and after journal coordination was arranged during 2019 among a set of Elsevier ‘ecosystem’ journals, we use two empirical strategies starting with difference-in-differences (DiD) analyses. The two-year impact factor model with interaction terms for different journal groups shows that ecosystem membership is associated with a modest increase in citations per document of approximately 40% for non-PubPeer ecosystem journals. However, four ecosystem journals have had an editor-in-chief who (co-)authored three or more papers that were subsequently flagged by PubPeer, and this group of journals experienced a 104% increase in citations per document. This PubPeer effect is robust to other DiD two-year model specifications, and significant at 1% – also in DiD models for three- and four-year impact factors. Machine-learning clustering independently identifies these four journals as part of a small “quickly-evolving” cluster distinguished by near-exponential growth in publication volume and extraordinary rates of self-citation and mutual citation among a small network of highly-prolific authors. The top four most-cited authors in this cluster made a total of 1006 self-citations and 803 citations to each other’s work between 2019 and 2024, compared with 90 self-citations and 53 mutual citations among the top four authors in the traditional top three journals over the same period.