Beyond Citations: Comparing Scholarly, Policy, and Patent Impact Across the FT50 Journals
For business school administrators and researchers, this work challenges the assumption that FT50 journals represent a homogeneous tier of excellence, revealing substantial within-list heterogeneity and showing that citation-only rankings overlook important dimensions of research influence.
The study analyzed over 60,000 publications from FT50 journals (2005-2019) and found that citation, policy, and patent impacts are largely independent dimensions, with elite economics journals dominating policy influence, information systems and marketing journals leading technological impact, and many highly cited management journals having limited non-academic reach. Nearly half of all journals change quartile when policy and patent indicators are added.
The Financial Times 50 (FT50) journal list shapes hiring, promotion, accreditation, and research evaluation across business schools worldwide. Yet journals on the list are typically treated as if they represent a homogeneous tier of excellence. We test this assumption by comparing 53 FT50 and recently removed journals across three distinct impact channels: scholarly influence (field-weighted citations and visibility), policy uptake, and technological reach through patent citations. Using a panel of more than 60,000 publications from 2005 to 2019, we find striking heterogeneity hidden beneath the binary FT50 label. Elite economics journals dominate policy influence, information systems and marketing journals lead technological impact, while many highly cited management journals exhibit limited reach beyond academia. Citation, policy, and patent indicators behave as largely independent dimensions of impact, with a citation-only ranking correlating only moderately with a multidimensional ranking. Nearly half of all journals change quartile once policy and patent indicators are incorporated, demonstrating that assessments based solely on scholarly citations overlook important dimensions of research influence. While the FT50 remains widely used as a binary classification of journal quality, our results reveal a substantial within-list impact spectrum and show that journal rankings are highly sensitive to how impact is defined and measured.