We examine the impact of the journal’s perceived ranking on its papers’ scientific impact. We take into account the early annual publications of the Academic Journal Guide published by the Association of Business Schools (AJG/ABS) during 2007-2010 and the absence of a publication over the next five years. We examine journals at the border of Grade-3 and Grade-4 (highest) in the following way: journals that entered in 2007 as Grade-3 and by 2010 were Grade-4 (upgrades) and the opposite (downgrades). We examine forward citations to approximately eight thousand publications from these journals published between 1993-2003, way before the AJG/ABS was first published. We compare citations made by UK-affiliated authors and US-affiliated authors to control for the inherent papers’ quality. We also perform Coarsened Exact Matching in the pre2007 citation patterns. Preliminary results show that papers from upgraded journals experience an increase in citations, made by UK-affiliated authors, compared to their downgraded counterparts. Future work needs to be done to trace the origin of this increase.
