Purpose of this paper: Due to the importance of research publications for the tenure promotion and for faculty in accounting, finance and information system areas, developing valid criteria for the assessment of quality in related journals is necessary.

Design/methodology/approach: Existing rankings are usually based on a survey among faculty members, while ignoring the chairs’ critical role in tenure evaluation. This paper uses department chairs’ responses to a survey asking to assess relative journal quality, and hence provides quantitative standards to measure research productivity. Our rankings are primarily obtained by the Familiarity-Rank Position Index (FARPI) method. We provide different sets of rankings for the decision-makers in universities, with various requirements for research.

Findings: We find that our rankings in accounting and finance areas are consistent with the prior research, but the rankings in the information system have changed significantly. We attribute this difference to the rapid growth in the field of information system. The robustness check also corroborates our ranking lists.