Abstract: [Purpose/Significance] There are many evaluation indicators and methods for journal evaluation, and it is of great significance to study the importance of evaluation indicators of journals. This paper proposed an analysis framework for "post-event" analysis of the importance or weight of evaluation indicators. [Method/Process] This paper divides the journal evaluation indicators into "before" importance and "after" importance, and focuses on the "after" importance, that is, the determination of key indicators after objective cluster analysis. Taking the bibliometric indicators of JCR 2019 economics journals as the research object, K-means clustering was first used to obtain the classification of evaluation results, and then the key indicators of journal evaluation were calculated based on principal component analysis and partial least squares discriminant analysis, and the importance of each indicator was analyzed. Starting from the objective results and the meaning of the indicators themselves, this study expounded the reasons why indicators are important. [Results/Conclusions] Compared with the importance of "before", the importance of "after the fact" is to determine the evaluation results first, without involving weights, and completely based on data evaluation. There is relatively little controversy in the selection of methods. The indicator is more scientific and objective; the use of multi-factor evaluation can comprehensively reflect the common influence of each variable, and the use of the "dimension reduction" idea can better retain the information of the original variables and reduce the multicollinearity of the evaluation indicator; K-means cluster analysis methods, both the PLS-DA and PLS-DA models, are capable of evaluating and classifying journals. According to the results of PLS-DA, the VIP value of five indicators is greater than 1; the three most important indicators that affect the evaluation results of journals obtained by the PLS-DA method are the journal impact factor(IF), the other citation IF and the five-year IF, and the meaning of the indicators is the IF of other citations and the five-year IF make up for the shortcomings of the IF; the importance of the journal IF, the IF of other citations and the five-year IF is not much different, and the importance of the journal IF is relatively greater. In the quantitative evaluation of journals, it is necessary to use multi-index evaluation to make the evaluation more comprehensive and scientific; PLS-DA has a good effect on general journals, but the better journals have a general effect, and cannot effectively distinguish Class A journals.

Key words: journal evaluation, multi-attribute evaluation, indicator importance, K-means clustering, partial least squares discriminant analysis