Risk Management and Insurance‐Related Journals: A Survey of Risk and Insurance Academics

AbstractThis research provides an assessment of the utility and quality of risk management and insurance (RMI)‐related journals using professorial expert opinion. Although Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)‐produced citation counts and article impact factors are widely available and commonly used methods of journal comparison, they are limited to very few generally premier journals in any field, including RMI, leaving stakeholders with substantial gaps when benchmarking journal factors. We bridge this gap by comparing RMI faculty opinion of quality to SSCI assessments for 13 journals with results indicating general consistency across these measures. The expert opinion approach is extended to assess quality across a sample of 30 RMI‐related publications, along with assigning journal categories delineated based on reported academic utility, contributing to RMI boundary definitions. Posthoc analysis indicates only modest influences for some individual, institutional, and journal‐related factors on professorial perceptions, evidence that expert opinions are reliable measures of RMI journal utility and quality. Additionally, only modest differences are found in journal quality assessments by academics relative to the teaching versus research institutional mission of their employers, as well as across perceived individual teaching versus research role expectations. Thus, the expert opinion approach to evaluating utility and quality, coupled with regression and subsample analysis, aids RMI academics and other stakeholders in journal assessment and boundary definition issues. These contributions to the advancement of journal assessment methodologies in general may also prove useful across academic disciplines.