Journal Rankings

[annieca]

I was working on a journal review on the Sage Publishing site when I saw this funny thing:

 

"Impact Facotr: 0.400 | Ranking: 32/65 in Area Studies | 111/157 in Political Science"

 

How does one rank the prestige of a journal? This journal in particular (East European Politics and Societies) is a specialized journal - does that make it less worthy in the eyes of the rankings, than say, the AHA or the Political Science Quarterly?

 

Any thoughts?

[snowshoes]

I am in a small field and one of the most respected journals has an IF around 2.0.  I base my opinion on the quality of articles I've read from the journal, as well as the opinion of others in the field.  There is a journal in my field with an IF of 5.5-6 and I would NEVER publish my work there.  The quality is poor and the founder/editor is sleazy and plays all the tricks to pump up the IF.

 

With open source journals and most things being available online, IF of a journal doesn't really mean that much to me.  You'd expect the most cutting edge and revolutionary papers to be in the big journals with huge IF, but when you look at other journals the IF doesn't really mean that much in my opinion.

 

I also think the whole IF thing is now a bit of a popularity game that is no longer very informative.  As a young researcher, one should go for the higher IF journals to boost their CV, but they shouldn't take it too seriously.

[fuzzylogician]

Two of the best journals in my field have IFs of 0.76 and 1.59. Those were the first two that I checked; I didn't check others but I'm sure they're also somewhere around there. The IF just isn't a useful metric in my field and no one decides where to submit a paper or how to regard its prestige based on the journal's IF. 

[Guest |||]

In my field IF is somewhat important, and in the long run could be important for your career.  If you publish in a journal that rarely gets looked at, you may not be cited despite having stellar work.  Given that there is some growing emphasise on not just how often scholars publish, but now on the impact of their publications, going for low IF journals isn't going to help.  I personally try to meet a mininum of IF = 2.

 

 

That said the importance will be field specific, and generally I think with the growing use of university large databases, IF of any particular journal will become less and less important for finding articles or having your article be found.  Though I still think some people will use IF as a proxy for quality.

[juilletmercredi]

Likely they are ranked by the impact factor.  In one of my fields, highest-IF journal has an IF of 15, but our flagship journal is a 5.1 and most of our "great" journals have an IF between 2 and 4 and our "good" journals have an IF between 1 and ~2.5.  In my other field, our flagship journal has an IF of 3.93 and most of the great and good journals in that field are somewhere between 0.7 and 3.

Very specialized journals often have lower impact factors than general journals, even if they are pretty influential in their subfield, just because the field is smaller.  For example, that journal with the IF of 15 (Psychological Bulletin) is our field's review paper journal, so of course people cite it all the time because there are crazy reviews in there.  There's another review-paper journal that has an IF of around 15 (Annual Review of Psychology), but it's not as respected as the flagship journal (American Psychologist), which in turn has a relatively low IF because they publish a lot of opinion pieces and retrospectives in addition to empirical articles.

I don't go solely based on IF but also general opinion in my field.  Also, I don't think you need to totally avoid journals with a low impact factor, but that you should mix it up and make sure you have some higher-IF/higher-reputation journals on your CV, too.

[annieca]

Interesting! I've never even heard of this before I found it on the Sage website. Sometimes I feel like there should be a "academia for dummies" class that all new grad students are required to take.

[AP]

I've just found the Google Metrics for journals and thought I'd share:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en

Might be useful...

[shadowclaw]

On 11/13/2016 at 3:03 PM, AP said:

I've just found the Google Metrics for journals and thought I'd share:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en

Might be useful...

I'd never heard of Google metrics for journals before, only impact factors. Thanks for the link! Looking through the journals in my field and their rankings according to Google, it greatly pleases me that the journal I recently published in has a much higher ranking than a journal I submitted to whose editor was a condescending and perhaps sexist a-hole (impact factor-wise, they are similar). You made my day.