Most people have never turned a page of the Journal of Finance, or even heard about this premier academic publication. But for scholars, getting published in the journal can signal a turn of fortune, delivering them into the upper strata of researchers in the field. And what about the select few whose articles earn the most citations in scholarly literature? They鈥檙e like a caste within the caste.
Jeffrey Pontiff, James F. Cleary Chair in Finance
Such distinction now belongs to Jeffrey Pontiff, holder of the James F. Cleary Chair in Finance at the Carroll School of Management. His January 2016 article in the Journal of Finance has been hovering at the top of the journal鈥檚 prominent list of its .
Co-authored with Georgetown鈥檚 David McLean, who earned his Ph.D. at the Carroll School in 2006, the article is titled 鈥� It鈥檚 a study of how the stock market responds to investment strategies highlighted by academic researchers鈥攊n a way, about whether anyone is listening to the professors. It won the 2016 Amundi Smith Breeden Prize for research in that journal.
Aside from these citations tracked by the Journal of Finance, the article has also scaled the heights of the for scholarly research, which covers a far broader swath of online sources including mentions in popular news outlets and even social media.
When asked about his most-cited status, Pontiff stepped lightly around the question. 鈥淎t BC, we have some incredible scholars,鈥� he underscored. 鈥淎nd that goes for the Carroll School, including our finance department.鈥� He pointed to a couple of professors in that department with more lifetime citations than he has鈥擯hil Strahan (who holds the John L. Collins, S.J. Chair in Finance) and Cliff Holderness.
Then, when asked if he often comes across discussions of his article when perusing finance journals, he noted, 鈥淚t鈥檚 a small field. We all read the same papers.鈥� His guesstimate was that there are, in all, a thousand or maybe two thousand finance professors in the United States who do original research in peer-reviewed journals, as he does.
鈥淒oes Academic Research Destroy Stock Return Predictability?鈥� has found echoes in not only scholarly journals but also the foremost news media. For example, referred to this 鈥渕uch-talked-about paper,鈥� which points out that after researchers publish their articles about stock market investing strategies, the effectiveness of these strategies 鈥渟eem to diminish,鈥� though not disappear.
鈥淲hy? It appears to be because the market consistently makes mistaken valuations of corporate earnings, which tend to be corrected in stock prices only when the final earnings evidence is staring traders in the face,鈥� the Times article said, in part citing follow-up research by Pontiff and colleagues. That article was written by none other than Yale鈥檚 Robert J. Shiller, the 2013 Nobel laureate for economics.听
Less technically, what Pontiff and McLean have shown is that investors do 鈥渃are about academic research. They鈥檙e even willing to bet their money on it,鈥� independent finance writer Tim Gray has written. For that reason, Pontiff told Gray in March 2017: 鈥淲ith this paper, I felt like I was able, for the first time in my life, to give people an answer to a fundamental question that we academics never really knew the answer to.鈥� That is, the market is listening.
And stock analysts aren鈥檛 the only ones paying notice. The Altmetric score for Pontiff-McLean puts their article at #9 on the all-time list for that broad metric. As for the Journal of Finance鈥檚听Top 25, the paper stood at #1 during this past summer; more recently another article crept ahead by just a few citations. Both articles are distantly in front of the third most cited paper.
William Bole is the Carroll School's director of content development.
听
听