Beyond Citations: Comparing Scholarly, Policy, and Patent Impact Across the FT50 Journals

2026-06-16

AI Summary

FT50 journals are often treated as a homogeneous benchmark of excellence, overlooking their substantial heterogeneity in multidimensional impact. This study develops an integrated evaluation framework that combines academic citations, policy uptake, and patent references to systematically compare the influence of 53 FT50 and formerly listed journals. Employing panel data analysis, field-weighted citation indicators, policy document tracking, and patent citation mining, the research reveals that nearly half of these journals experience a quartile shift in ranking when non-academic impact metrics are incorporated. These findings demonstrate that conventional citation-based assessments significantly underestimate the real-world influence of many journals, thereby challenging the prevailing evaluation paradigm and underscoring the necessity and innovative value of multidimensional impact assessment.

Abstract

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.

Problem

• FT50 journals
• research impact
• citation
• policy influence
• patent citations

Innovation

• multidimensional impact
• policy citations
• patent citations
• field-weighted citation impact
• journal heterogeneity