New ABS Journal Rankings Out!
Today marks the launch of the new Association of Business Schools Journal Ranking (2015) edition. Everywhere, business journal publishers have been awaiting this with bated breath- it’s like their Oscars, but without the nice dresses. Following my own Oscar-worthy performance at the DeFims Research Away Day (see what I did there?!), I felt it would be interesting to blog about this event, and perhaps compare some titles against the previous ranking.
Unfortunately the site has crashed under heavy load, so perhaps I should instead advise you to leave it a few days to check it out?! (how’s that for breaking the Internet, Kim Kardashian-West?!) Once I manage to get the details I will be posting a new blog item discussing them.
In the meantime, there are other journal evaluation metrics available, for those interested enough not to have been put off by the pop-culture references, and who are too impatient to wait:
SCOPUS, run by Elseveir, claims to be the world’s largest abstract and citation database. According to their website, it currently contains 55 million records, 21,915 titles and 5,000 publishers. Which sounds like a pretty respectable reading list… It covers all subjects, but is especially regarding for Science and Social Science publishing.
Journal Citation Reports (JCR), is from the rival publisher, Thomson Reuters, who claim to be the recognised authority on journal evaluation. Their Social Science edition covers more than 3,000 leading journals, whilst the database as a whole contains 10,800 journals from over 2,550 publishers in approximately 232 disciplines from 83 countries.
Whilst we do not hold subscriptions to these resources, both these are available via the British Library to any intrepid researcher seeking to maximise the impact of their research. Although do also note the high rejection rates and the length of time it can take to publish in the top journals and please take this into consideration.
Google Scholar Metrics: Freely available online. As an example, here is their listing of the top publications for Business, Economics & Management. Details on how their metrics are calculated are here.
Elseveir do also have a free service, Journal Metrics. This permits a researcher to look up any journal that they know the title of and obtain the following metrics:
- Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)
- The Impact per Publication (IPP)
- SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
Failing this, if you are interested in the SCOPUS or JCR ranking of just one specific journal, this information is often found on their homepage, as publishers are keen to advertise this information.
Not sure what a journal ranking index is? Very simply put, they are metrics designed to show how influential a journal is within the academic community which it serves. They evaluate details such as the number of citations to obtain these figures.
Are metrics any use? Yes, to a point. They provide a guide to the likely impact of any work published within journals. But there are other factors that you should be taking into account when you look to publish your work. The Research Office would be the best people to advise further on this.