Exploring the Author Affiliation Index

The Author Affiliation Index (AAI) for ranking a set of academic journals was first presented by Gorman and Kanet (Manuf Serv Oper Manag 7:3–19, 2005 ). Since that time, it has become a popular method for assessing journal quality in a myriad of academic disciplines. However, a recent paper published by Agrawal et al. (Prod Oper Manag 20:280–300, 2011 ) pointed out several potential problems with the AAI. In this paper, we present a modified AAI that incorporates several improvements to the original AAI and addresses the three concerns expressed by Agrawal. The modified AAI allows for international institutions, introduces a weighting factor to allow for a greatly expanded set of prestigious institutions, considers the entire population of articles published in a journal during a specified time period, and utilizes a batch means approach to data collection to allow for proper statistical inference. We illustrate the modified AAI using a set of ten well-known journals that publish Operations Research and Operations Management research. The primary intent of this paper, however, is not to rank these ten journals; rather these ten journals are simply used to illustrate the use of the newly developed modified AAI.