Measuring journal performance for multidisciplinary research: An efficiency perspective

• We develop a measure of journal performance using data envelopment analysis (DEA).
• DEA-IF measures the efficiency of journals’ citation generation processes.
• DEA-IF mirrors field-different characteristics of citation densities and dynamics.
• DEA-IF can be used for comparative evaluation of multidisciplinary journals.
• A case study example of industrial engineering journals is provided.

One of the flaws of the journal impact factor (IF) is that it cannot be used to compare journals from different fields or multidisciplinary journals because the IF differs significantly across research fields. This study proposes a new measure of journal performance that captures field-different citation characteristics. We view journal performance from the perspective of the efficiency of a journal's citation generation process. Together with the conventional variables used in calculating the IF, the number of articles as an input and the number of total citations as an output, we additionally consider the two field-different factors, citation density and citation dynamics, as inputs. We also separately capture the contribution of external citations and self-citations and incorporate their relative importance in measuring journal performance. To accommodate multiple inputs and outputs whose relationships are unknown, this study employs data envelopment analysis (DEA), a multi-factor productivity model for measuring the relative efficiency of decision-making units without any assumption of a production function. The resulting efficiency score, called DEA-IF, can then be used for the comparative evaluation of multidisciplinary journals’ performance. A case study example of industrial engineering journals is provided to illustrate how to measure DEA-IF and its usefulness.