Pressures to get into different journal rating systems seem to also give rise to questionable practices among editors but also authors. Here is a survey that tries to get a grip of it, looking at the practice of editors asking authors to include citations to their journal in their articles. Click here to fill it in.
Gyöngyi
P.S. Thanks to Allen Wilhite and Eric A. Fong for the question and the survey!
Posted in Academic journals, Journal ranking
It seems as if a no day could go by without another logistics journal getting into ISI to receive an impact factor evaluation. According to the latest news, the International Journal of Logistics Management has now got green light as well. Congrats!
Gyöngyi
Next in line, the Journal of Business Logistics (JBL) was now also added to be rated by Thomson ISI’s Social Sciences Index. The actual rating is coming later, but due to rates depending on cross-quotes, this is good news for all other logistics journals as well. While waiting for the Journal Citation Index’ impact factor to be published, one can always consult Chapman and Ellinger’s (2009) article on impact factors in logistics and supply chain management.
Gyöngyi
Whereas the google citation analysis allows analysis of particular articles, the 2010 ABS Academic Journal Guide ranks academic journals in various management and business disciplines. Among the changes from last year is IJPDLM moving up by one category – well done!
Árni
What is your university going for, subjective rankings or “objective” citation analysis? Here comes citation analysis quick and dirty – an advanced search in google scholar. Type in a name and you get the most cited article of a person, type in a journal and you get the most cited articles of the journal. Contrary to ISI ratings, this is not confined to the journals that have been rated already but does also not give you a “fixed” rate (NB! even ISI ratings change every year).
Let’s run it for some random journals. The most cited articles of all times (all times google, that is) are
- for IJOPM: Neely et al. (1995): “Performance measurement systems design” (cited 776 times to date)
- for IJPE: Beamon (1998): “Supply chain design and analysis: models and methods (cited 712 times to date)
- for JOM: Flynn et al. (1994): “A framework for quality management research and associated measurement instrument (cited 648 times to date)
- for JBL: Mentzer et al. (2001): “Defining supply chain management” (cited 556 times)
- for IJPDLM: Spekman et al. (1998)’s “An empirical investigation into supply chain management” (cited 399 times, though notably a reprint from SCM:IJ)
- for IJLM: Lambert et al. (1996): “Developing and implementing supply chain partnerships” (252 times)
- for SCM:IJ: Cox (1999): “Power, value and supply chain management” (223)
- for JSCM: Zsidisin (2003): “Managerial perceptions of supply risk” (188)
Yes, this is a convenience sample but it is fun 
– and the technique may be helpful in identifying the articles one should definitely not miss on a particular topic.
Gyöngyi
Good news, the International Journal of Logistics: Research and Applications (IJL:RA or IJoL, whichever abbreviation you prefer) has been accepted onto the Social Sciences Citation Index of the ISI. Its first impact factor should be published in June 2011. It’s just to hope that more SCM journals get included soon – a number of them are currently being evaluated.
The next question is of course what their impact factor would be, and how this will affect journal rankings, publication points you get for articles in different journals, the ABS ranking system…
Gyöngyi
Those who are interested in the development of research in Operations Management will find this paper by Andrew Taylor and Margaret Taylor (editors of IJOPM* during the last 5 years) relevant to their collection:
Operations management research: contemporary themes, trends and potential future directions
The paper identifies main research themes, use of research methods, and reasons for rejecting manuscripts.
The analysis of 310 articles published in IJOPM from 2004-2009 identified these as amongst the top-five themes in the journal:
1. Supply Chain Management
2. Operations Strategy
3. Performance Management
4. Service Operations
5. Lean Methods
What is in particular of interest in this paper is the insight the editors provide into the publication process; main reasons for rejection of manuscripts are presented and discussed. In addition, the paper provides overview on the use of various research methods, which indicates a relative balanced use of surveys and the case study method.
Árni
*International Journal of Operations & Production Management
Cutting-edge crossing-boundaries interdisciplinary or even multidisciplinary research – wasn’t that what we were all interested in and encouraged to do? Sadly, our incentive systems do not correspond with this dream (as not to say utopia). Meet the deans at EABIS came with news for e.g. CSR scholars: sure, you are not going to be rewarded to do interdisciplinary research but still you should follow this path. Now that is sthg for established tenure faculty, but if your career is not advancing just because you e.g. published in the “wrong” (note, not bad, just not in your discipline) journals, you may think twice about where you submit your paper to.
Journal ranking “lists” are particularly good at giving a good last stab to this ideal. ABS encourages you to publish in your discipline only (however weirdly it may define “your” discipline for you, i.e. only OM journals count for SCM research, and if you are a geographer, do not dare to publish in any geography journal that is not on the business school list, after all, you are not an engineer or a natural scientist, are you?). Above all, it’s the death of interdisciplinary research. CSR researchers beware. Health care logistics, what’s that. The list goes on and on. The problem is, all these topics would indeed be cutting-edge and cross boundaries, with a good potential to push our limits of knowledge. But that is not what science is all about – or is it?
Gyöngyi
“Meet the editors” at Euroma: JOM and (the new) IJOPM editors declared in unison that they were most interested in theory-driven, empirically based papers. In other words, nothing that does not take its parameters at least from an actual empirical study, and nothing that just suggest yet another (consultancy) ‘methodology’. Well, IJOPM did add their quest for more conceptual pieces that would challenge existing frameworks. But while these two are trying to move up in academic quality, rigor, and citation indices, another journal has been introduced with the aim of being a solid “B” journal: OM Review. Though as Andi Smart pointed out, not as if IJOPM had ever rejected a paper with the suggestion to submit it to JOM instead
What else was new? Euroma 2009 had a number of special tracks, but the most overwhelming in number of papers was the one on ops mgmt in healthcare. It ran through the entire conference and even had parallel healthcare sessions.
Gyöngyi
PS Please post the link to OM Review if you find it – I haven’t come across any direct link, just many references to the journal.
Authors are well advised to check out editorial policies on review processes. While you may assume sending a paper to a international “peer reviewed” journal assures you of a blind review process, some even “better” journals (such as the International Journal of Production Economics) only subscribe to a single-blind review – i.e. authors do not know who their reviewers are but reviewers certainly do know who the authors are. This is not to say there wouldn’t be good arguments to present for single-blind or even open reviews, the question is just why this is not openly stated in the journal’s editorial policy… So this is not blind, it’s just candid. More room for ring-a-ring-o’-roses. Nobody said it was easy to be a scientist
Gyöngyi
