Is journal prestige indicator equivalent of money for humans?

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the time evolution of the rank correlation coefficients of the prestige indicators of the journals (such as Scimago Journal Rank) over 21 years, for 9856 journals in various disciplines. The observed dependencies do not differ qualitatively from those observed for the time evolution of the ranking correlations in wealth rheology among the richest people recently found by Burda et al. [Entropy 23, 842 (2021)], but quantitatively the changes in rank correlations for human wealth are much stronger than in the coefficients measuring the prestige of journals. In terms of Kendall’s rank correlation coefficients, disciplines “Agricultural and Biological Sciences” and “Earth and Planetary Science” are the most typical, meaning that the time evolution of their rank correlation coefficient based on Scimago Journal Rank is closest to the time evolution of an average over all disciplines. The time evolution of the mean value of the overlap ratio is closest to the time evolution of the overlap ratio for “Psychology” and “Physics and Astronomy” disciplines. The Kendall rank correlation coefficients and the overlap ratio decrease nearly linearly over time, except for the first year, where their decay is significantly faster. The analogy between human wealth and the prestige indicators of journals is strengthened by performing a Monte Carlo simulation of the time evolution of the probability distribution function of Scimago Journal Rank. The simulation is based on a simple model of economic systems. Due to the different coverage of the journals in Scimago Journal & Country Rank and Web of Science, the identically defined measures based on the data in these databases are different.