Impact factor as a metric to assess journals where OM research is published

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThis paper investigates impact factor as a metric for ranking the quality of journal outlets for operations management (OM) research. We review all prior studies that assessed journal outlets for OM research and compare all previous OM journal quality rankings to rankings based on impact factors. We find that rankings based on impact factors that use data from different time periods are highly correlated and provide similar rankings of journals using either two-year or five-year assessment periods, either with or without self-citations. However, some individual journals have large rank changes using different impact factor specifications. We also find that OM journal rankings based on impact factors are only moderately correlated with journal quality rankings previously determined using other methods, and the agreement among these other methods in ranking the quality of OM journals is relatively modest. Thus, impact factor rankings alone are not a replacement for the assessment methods used in previous studies, but rather they evaluate OM journals from another perspective.

A bibliometric analysis of operations research and management science

“…In recent years, there have been many criticisms of the impact factor. For example, it is easy to manipulate it by using self-citations or similar techniques [15,39]. WoS has tried to solve this problem by penalizing those journals that make excessive manipulations to the impact factor, but it is clear that many other issues have to be considered when analysing the quality of a journal, including the editorial board members and the peer-review process [2].…”

Accounting Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…Pilkington and Meredith (2009) analysed the most influential papers by using a citation analysis approach. Some other papers have presented several journal rankings in the field, including Barman et al (2001), Holsapple and Lee-Post (2010), Petersen et al (2011), Stonebraker et al (2012 and Theoharakis et al (2007). Many discussions have focused on determining the significance of production and operations management as an independent research field (Linderman and Chandrasekaran 2010;Pilkington and Liston-Hayes 1999).…”

The influence of co-authorship on article impact in OR/MS/OM and the exchange of knowledge with Finance in the twenty-first century

“…Therefore, our choice of four-year citation count is the optimal approach for investigating publications to emerge in the period [2001][2002][2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008]. Further support for this choice can be found in Stonebraker et al (2012) who conclude that in Operations Management a larger number of citations emerge in years 3-5 (our choice is the mid-point of this range). Equally relevant, two key articles on influence of collaboration in Finance on article impact also use a four-year citation count (see Avkiran 1997Avkiran , 2013.…”