Journal Rankings: Comparing Reputation, Citation and Acceptance Rates

Research productivity is important in school reputation as well as individual faculty evaluation. In order to evaluate research productivity, the quality of research is often measured by proxy through the number of journal articles and ratings of the journals in which they appear. Because of this there is significant pressure on faculty to publish in the “top journals”. There are several metrics for evaluating and ranking journals, each of them with its own merits and limitations. Some commonly used quantitative measures of research quality are citation analyses, acceptance rates, and whether or not a journal is peer reviewed. Alternatively, journals can be ranked qualitatively into stratified groups based on reputation. Reputation, in turn, may be correlated with perceived values of quantitative measures, and thus is more subjective. The purpose of this research is to examine the extent of correlation between various measures of journal quality, in particular between quantitative and qualitative measures. The various measures are compared to examine the extent to which they are similar. Comparisons were also made among business departments. For this sample, overall journal rank was correlated with citation rate but not with acceptance rate. However, quantitative measures were not consistent among academic departments, indicating that journal rank can not be reliably used to make interdepartmental comparisons.