Journal Ranking

If you would like to view some of the popular and publicly available journal 'ranking' lists head on over to the researchimpact.com.au forum to check out:

• Eigenfactor.org
• ERA Journal Ranking
• Harzing - journal quality list
• ABDC - journal quality list

Make a comment on these lists or perhaps add some of the ones that you know of or use.

Why was it better to be a researcher in Design Practice and Management than Forestry for ERA 2010?

www.researchimpact.com.au

ERA 2012 Journal List

With the Australian Research Council (ARC) removing the journal rankings (A*-C) from their ERA journal list there will be an increased focus on citation metrics and specifically the relative citation impact (RCI). In fields of research that did not undergo peer review - ERA ratings were no doubt driven by the RCI values available to the national Research Evaluation Committees (RECs). The RCI is a ratio of the number of citations per paper a particular unit of evaluation has to the expected world citation rate. RCI is most useful because it is discipline and time specific meaning that it takes into account both the fact that different disciplines have different citation trends and that older articles generally have more citations than younger articles. RCIs can be calculated using data available from citation data suppliers such as Elsevier (Scopus) and Thomson Reuters (Web of Science).

ERA 2010 Journal Ranking List

The Australian Research Council (ARC) have now released their ERA 2010 Ranked Journal list (and ranked conference list too - although this one seemed to appear with much less fanfare than the journal list). The Ranked Journal List contains tens of thousands of peer reviewed journal titles covering all manner of fields of research. The list will be used for the upcoming Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative. The list provides information about the journal titles including the Field of Research (FOR) code that it covers, whether it is indexed by citation and abstracts database Scopus and most "importantly" a quality ratings of A*-C. The quality rating is roughly A* = top 5% of articles by quality; A = next 15%; B = next 30% and C = bottom 50%. While the list makes the practical task of submitting a higher education provider's research output data to the ARC easier, all nicely bundled into FOR codes and with histograms of quality within those FORs, it is definitely not perfect. The main problem is that while the FOR codes and rank might conveniently describe the journal - they do not always accurately describe the individual articles within the journal. This causes problems when the article within a journal inherits the FOR code classifications and ranking of the journal it is published in.

There has been some mention of the idea that with this rating scale "C" ranked journals may disappear as everyone will publish in the A and A* rated journals. My problem with this idea is that it assumes that all those people who currently publish in C rated journals could have those same articles published in A and A* rated journals - this is unlikely. Also, what if none of their colleagues read the A* and A journals - why would they want to publish their work somewhere that no one will see it? I believe that the increasing interest in "open access" journals will have a much bigger impact on publication behavior and research in general than the ranked list will. I doubt that the academic community will be pushed into publishing only in exclusive and expensive A* and A rated journals that no one can afford or want to read - this would defeat the whole point of them doing research and I just can't imagine this list having such a dramatic impact on them.

http://www.arc.gov.au/era/key_docs10.htm

Eigenfactor

Eigenfactor is a web based tool that ranks research journals. There are a number of journal rankings available, including; Thomson-Reuters' impact factor, the Australian Research Council (ARC) journal ranking list and various other discipline specific ranking lists. Each of these lists attempts to rank journals based on their quality within a field of research - and each list has its own ranking criteria.

Eigenfactor uses citation metrics to rank journals and gives weightings to citations from specific journals based on their quality. It works in much the same way that Google's pagerank algorithm works. Eigenfactor also includes a indicator of the value for money a journal delivers; this is a feature that is quite unique to the Eigenfactor.

To see a short article I wrote on the Eigenfactor for Collection Management click here.

To visit the Eigenfactor website and try it for yourself, click here.

Information on the ARC's journal ranking lists can be found at the ARC's ERA website.