Grading Journals in Economics : The ABCs of the ABDC

The Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) have graded journals in the fields of Economics and Statistics to evaluate the quality of research. This paper examines the consistency of these grades with 44 bibliometric indicators of journal quality and measures of interrater agreement. First, we categorise the bibliometrics employing a unique cluster analysis based on an interrater agreement statistic. Then, we determine which journals have been assigned ABDC grades that do not reflect the rank of the bibliometrics. These cases provide an indication of the extent to which the ABDC journal grades are determined by non-bibliometric factors