The figures
Interactive recreations of the paper's key exhibits, on the 2005–2019 window with seven per-publication indicators. Hover any mark for detail.
The FT50 quality map
Each journal placed by citation impact (x: mean z-score of FWCI, Top-10% rate, FW Views Impact) against societal reach (y: mean z-score of policy & patent per-pub indicators). Bubble size is overall z-score; colour is discipline. Upper-right (Q1) leads on both; lower-left (Q4) trails on both.
The within-FT50 quality spectrum
Every journal's rank (1 = best, 53 = worst) on each of the seven per-publication indicators, sorted by composite rank. Titles are coloured by discipline; horizontal rules mark the quartile boundaries. Green = top, red = bottom.
Trajectories & projections
Composite rank recomputed on seventeen overlapping 5-year windows (2005–2009 → 2021–2025), with a naive 3-year linear projection (dashed). The axis is inverted, so rank 1 sits at the top.
Journal explorer
Search, sort, and filter all 53 FT50 journals. Select a row for its per-metric trajectories.
| Journal | Discipline | FWCI (rank) | Policy (rank) | Patents (rank) | Output | Archetype |
|---|
Methods
A bibliometric comparison of the 53 Financial Times 50 (FT50) journals across citation, policy, and patent impact.
Read the full data & methods
The FT50 list is widely used to evaluate business-school research; SciVal indexes some titles as separate entities, giving 53 series, analysed over 1996–2023. The headline analysis uses publication years 2005–2019 and seven per-publication indicators (three citation, two policy, two patent), each normalised by scholarly output. Citation-, policy-, and patent-based metrics are year-trimmed to avoid accrual artefacts. Composite ranks average the within-FT50 ranks across the seven indicators; relationships across channels use Spearman rank correlations; discipline shares aggregate journal-level totals by cluster.
The seven indicators
Journals are compared on seven per-publication indicators, each normalised by scholarly output. A journal's composite rank averages its within-FT50 rank across all seven.
Citation
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI)
- Citations relative to the world average for papers of the same field, year, and document type; 1.0 = world average. Elsevier, Research Metrics Guidebook (2019); Larivière & Sugimoto (2019)
- Top-10% rate
- Share of a journal's papers ranked in the global top decile by field-weighted citations. Elsevier, Research Metrics Guidebook (2019)
- Field-Weighted Views Impact
- Like FWCI, but for usage: views relative to the world average for the same field, year, and type. Elsevier, Research Metrics Guidebook (2019)
Policy
- Policy citations per paper
- Citations from public-policy documents, per published paper (citing policy documents ÷ scholarly output). Overton — Szomszor & Adie (2022)
- Share of papers reaching policy
- Fraction of a journal's papers cited by at least one policy document. Overton — Szomszor & Adie (2022); coverage caveats in Cristofoletti et al. (2025)
Patent
- Patent citations per paper
- Citations from patents, per published paper (patent citations ÷ scholarly output). Elsevier, SciVal Usage and Patent Metrics Guidebook (2019)
- Share of papers reaching patents
- Fraction of a journal's papers cited by at least one patent. Elsevier, SciVal Usage and Patent Metrics Guidebook (2019)
Read & cite the paper
Hajikhani, Arash, Yi Zhang, and Mengjia Wu. “Beyond Citations: Comparing Scholarly, Policy, and Patent Impact Across the FT50 Journals.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.17610 (2026).