Scholarly journal evaluation based on panel data analysis

This paper proposes a new method for indicator selection in panel data analysis and tests the method with relevant data on agricultural journals provided by the Institute of Scientific & Technical Information of China. An evaluation exercise by the TOPSIS method is conducted as a comparison. The result shows that panel data analysis is an effective method for indicator selection in scholarly journal evaluation; journals of different disciplines should not be evaluated with the same criteria; it is beneficial to publish all the evaluation indicators; unavailability of a few indicators has a limited influence on evaluation results; simplifying indicators can reduce costs and increase efficiency as well as accuracy of journal evaluation.