Evaluating journal quality: A review of journal citation indicators and ranking in business and management

Abstract

a b s t r a c tEvaluating the quality of academic journals is becoming increasing important within the context of research performance evaluation. Traditionally, journals have been ranked by peer review lists such as that of the Association of Business Schools (UK) or though their journal impact factor (JIF). However, several new indicators have been developed, such as the h-index, SJR, SNIP and the Eigenfactor which take into account different factors and therefore have their own particular biases. In this paper we evaluate these metrics both theoretically and also through an empirical study of a large set of business and management journals. We show that even though the indicators appear highly correlated in fact they lead to large differences in journal rankings. We contextualise our results in terms of the UK's large scale research assessment exercise (the RAE/REF) and particularly the ABS journal ranking list. We conclude that no one indicator is superior but that the h-index (which includes the productivity of a journal) and SNIP (which aims to normalise for field effects) may be the most effective at the moment.

Research performance as a quality signal in international labor markets: Visibility of business schools worldwide through a global research performance system

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Group-works: exploring multiplex networks, leadership and group performance

“…First, this study focused on quantity of publications and not the quality. Across the many disciplines that made up this case study, there was not much agreement as to what denotes quality and if anything, plenty of critique as to the singular approach to measuring journals rankings (Willmott 2011, Mingers and Yang, 2017). With such disagreement and critique of the methodology of judging quality of publications, it was felt that for the purposes of this study, it was best to have a simple measure of number over quality.…”

Visualizing Sustainability Research in Business and Management (1990–2019) and Emerging Topics: A Large-Scale Bibliometric Analysis

“…As such, it allowed us to investigate the research output in an interdisciplinary and refined way. This journal list is widely adopted by business schools and other stakeholders in evaluating the scientific production and dissemination in business and management disciplines in UK [38]. Collectively, 433 journals in all 22 disciplines in business and management were included based on the five measurements including article citation, institution list, peer surveys, citation studies, and derived lists (Appendix A).…”