Aggregating Incomplete Lists of Journal Rankings: An Application to Academic Accounting Journals*

We introduce a branch‐and‐cut algorithm to aggregate published journal rankings based on subsets of the accounting literature in order to create a consensus ranking. The aggregate ranking allows specialist and regional journals, which may only be ranked in a limited number of studies, to be placed with respect to each other and with respect to the generalist journals that are usually included in ranking studies. The approach we develop is a significant advance over ad hoc approaches to aggregating journal rankings that have appeared in the literature and may provide a theoretically sound and replicable basis for further exploration of the concept of journal quality and the stability of journal rankings over time and ranking methods.