Fairness in the Institutional Valuation of Business Journals1

The fairness of performance evaluation is a concern for all professions, and the appraisal of research output is of particular interest to business scholars and academic administrators. We describe research assessment as a process of social construction that is heavily influenced by journal valuation in business schools. Using journal quality data from multiple sources, we empirically investigate whether the journals in each of eight business disciplines (Accounting, Economics, Finance, Information Systems, Management, Marketing, Operations Management, and Quantitative Methods) are treated evenly across the board. Specifically, we explore whether each business discipline exhibits recognition fairness (i.e., actual institutional journal evaluations are the same as market expectations) and inclusion fairness (i.e., actual availability of publication space in top journals being the same as market expectations). Our findings indicate that faculty in some disciplines enjoy an advantage, while faculty in other fields are disadvantaged. Consequently, we offer recommendations to ameliorate this inequity.