Rankings of marketing journals. College professors earn tenure by publishing in peer-reviewed academic journals. The rankings of these journals (often subjective) play a key role in the tenure process. A paper in the Journal of Informetrics (Vol. 4, 2010) investigated the merits of a new index designed for ranking journals and applied the index to recently published marketing journal articles. The new hg-index, based on Google Scholar searches, combines an assessment of both the quantity and quality of the papers published in the journal—the higher the hg-index score, the better the journal. This new index was compared with a count of the number of citations articles in the journal generated. Data on the hg-index score and number of citations for 20 (fictitious) marketing journals are provided in the table below. The researchers used Spearman’s rank correlation to measure the association between the two methods of ranking marketing journals.

a. Give one reason why the researchers used Spearman’s rank correlation rather than the usual (Pearson) correlation coefficient, r, from Chapter 11.

b. Rank the 20 hg-index scores.

c. Rank the 20 values of number of citations.

d. Compute Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient, rs. Practically interpret this value.

e. Conduct a test of hypothesis to determine if the true rank correlation in the population of all marketing journals is greater than 0. Test using a = .01.