The demise of the ARC journal ranking scheme: an ex post analysis of the accounting and finance journals

The recent abolition of the ARC journal ranking scheme is indicative of some problematical features of journal ranking in general and the ARC scheme in particular. An alternative citation‐based ranking scheme is applied to the accounting and finance journals to highlight some loopholes in the abandoned ARC scheme and provide some suggestions for how to proceed with ERA 2012. By re‐ranking journals according to their citation indices, it is demonstrated that the ARC ranking placed a large number of journals where they do not belong. As a result, the ARC scheme induced some adverse behavioural changes with respect to preferred publication outlets.