Evaluating Journal Quality: A Review of Journal Citation Indicators and Ranking in Business and Management

TL;DR

This paper reviews various journal citation metrics used in business and management, analyzing their theoretical foundations and empirical rankings, and discusses their biases and effectiveness for research evaluation.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of multiple journal metrics, highlighting their differences and suggesting the most effective indicators for assessing journal quality.

Findings

Metrics are highly correlated but produce different rankings.

No single indicator is definitively superior.

h-index and SNIP are potentially the most effective metrics.

Abstract

Evaluating the quality of academic journal 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 contextualize 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 normalize for field effects) may be the most effective at the moment.