Editorial Board Representation: An Alternative Method for Ranking Real Estate Programs

Journal of Real Estate Practice and Education,  2004  by Urbancic, Frank R

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Abstract. This paper provides a ranking of the academic standing of real estate programs based on faculty representation to the editorial boards of leading core real estate journals for the years 1998 and 2003. The study shows that faculty affiliated with a relatively small group of institutions dominates editorial board representation. The study also shows by comparisons that most of the institutions that are highly ranked for editorial board representation are also highly ranked in previous studies of research productivity based on publications. By focusing only on journals that are universally recognized to be the top journals in real estate, editorial board membership as a ranking method clearly saves time and can be easily done at regular intervals.

Introduction

The reported results of studies that rank the academic standing of real estate programs are of continual interest to the membership of the real estate discipline. The results provide programs with comparative feedback as a basis for monitoring their progress and relative status. In particular, the prestige associated with achievement of the highest ranks can prove valuable to a program in terms of attracting high quality students, excellent faculty, increased budget allocations and externally generated financial support.

Rankings for real estate programs can be developed by applying different methods such as counting the number of published articles by faculty, determining the number of citations to published research and conducting surveys to measure peer ratings or perceived quality. The inherent subjectivity of the survey method places it at a disadvantage relative to the more objective methods. The methods that involve counts of published articles or citation analysis gain objectivity, but typically involve an elaborate and tedious process for data collection. Therefore, an alternative method for ranking programs has evolved that is based on examining faculty representation on the editorial boards of leading journals. Considerable power over a discipline is vested in editorial board members. Their decisions control the type of research that is published, determine the success of academicians as scholars and sustain a journal's reputation for quality. Thus, selection to a position on an editorial board for a leading journal is a distinct honor for a faculty member, as well as the member's university and department.

Studies of editorial board representation have been used to rank programs in accounting (Mittermaier, 1991; and Volkan, Colley and Boone 1993), economics (Gibbons and Fish, 1991), finance (Kaufman 1984; and Chan and Fok, 2003) marketing (Kurtz and Boone, 1988), statistics (Gibbons, 1990) and transportation (Boone, Gibson and Kurtz, 1988). A multidisciplinary study by Trieschmann, Dennis, Northcraft and Niemi (2000) adds to the validity and relevance of editorial board representation as a basis for ranking academic standing. In their study, the authors report a significant positive correlation between the number of journal editorships held by business school faculty and the rankings of business schools as published annually in Business Week and U.S. News and World Report.

Gibbons and Fish (1991), Mittermaier (1991), and Volkan, Colley and Boone (1993) emphasize that a ranking based on editorial board representation reflects both the quality of faculties and their visibility relative to other institutions, but is much easier and faster to obtain than rankings based on other criteria. Recognizing this important advantage, the purpose of the present study is to apply the editorial board method to the real estate discipline as a basis for identifying the top ranked programs and to facilitate comparison with previous studies based on alternative ranking methods. However, it should be noted that a ranking for editorial board representation is primarily a measure of academic reputation for scholarship and research as opposed to teaching or service/industry reputation.

Research Method

This study examines faculty representation on editorial boards of leading core real estate journals as a basis to comparatively rank real estate programs. Editorial board memberships for a set of real estate journals are examined for the first issue of each journal for 1998 and 2003. Prior studies of editorial board representation by Boone, Gibson and Kurtz (1988), Gibbons (1990), Gibbons and Fish (1991) and Volkan, Colley and Boone (1993) use a single year for data collection. However, over time changes occur in the composition of editorial boards. Therefore, two observation points, 1998 and 2003, are used as the basis to collect editorial board membership data for the current study. The year 1998 provides a five-year interval to allow for editorial board changes and at the same time keeps the data reasonably recent enough to make the results meaningful.

An essential element for a study based on editorial board membership data is the identification of an appropriate core group of leading real estate journals. In their study to determine rankings for accounting programs on the basis of editorial board representation, Volkan, Colley and Boone (1993) concluded that it is not necessary to use a large number of journals. They compared the editorial board representation rankings of accounting programs based on a group of fifty-four accounting journals with rankings based on a small subset of the group consisting of only the top journals in accounting. The result of their comparative analysis indicates that the use of a data source of a relatively few top academic journals yields essentially the same outcome as using a large number of journals. Therefore, in correspondence with the finding reported by Volkan et al., the current study is based on the top three leading core journals as identified in the real estate journal quality rating studies by Webb and Albert (1995), Diaz, Black and Rabianski (1996), Redman, Manakyan and Tanner (1998, 1999) and Gibler and Ziobrowski (2002), and also in the real estate authorship studies by Clauretie and Daneshvary (1993), Ziobrowski and Gibler (2000) and Dombrow and Turnbull (2002). These three journals are Real Estate Economics (REE), the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics (JREFE) and the Journal of Real Estate Research (JRER). Despite a high rating in some of the prior journal quality studies, the Journal of Urban Economics, Land Economics, Journal of Housing Economics, Journal of Finance and Journal of Financial Economics were excluded from the study. Although these journals are considered to be prestigious outlets for published research in real estate, according to Clauretie and Daneshvary (1993) and Dombrow and Turnbull (2002), none of the aforementioned journals are regarded as a core real estate journal primarily devoted to the publication of real estate studies.