Dear All, I know we are all obsessed with rankings (see Alex Stewart on the NACIREMA ritual). I was indoctrinated by Larry Cummings to believe "where you publish will be held against you." But, one of my current colleagues is Shelby Hunt. Shelby is one of the most cited people in Marketing. He believes the opposite of Larry, ie., if you spend time on a piece of research, find an outlet for it even if it is a B or C journal. Now an old piece by Cici and Peters (Am Psych) found that if your CV is long (like Shelby's), then as long as 1/3 were in highly regarded outlets, the whole CV would be see as high quality. If, however, you had a short CV, then most of your publications needed to be in highly regarded outlets for your CV to be seen as high in quality. Adding to this is Golden-Biddle and Locke's (JMI) observation that citations were of two types. One in which the citation was central to the thrust of the article or the citation was about the central argument of the cited person's article. The other type of citation was essentially a throw away, neither central to the article or a part of the cited person's central argument. Furthermore, Bill Starbuck (OS) argued that good work often does not get published in top tier journals, and that less meritorious work does. He discusses why this is so. Finally, some of the most highly cited work is in books and book chapters and is automatically discounted by many schools. Given, the above (and there has been a lot more written), what should we do. One alternative is to do nothing. Leave the system as is with each school/department struggling to come up with a system that makes sense ( or nonsense) to them taking into account their mission, type of school, etc. Another is to look at the individual's impact on the field. Is the individual cited (by Thompson, Harzing, etc). In this case you care more about a person's reputation than where his/her work appears. Third,you could ignore citations all together and actually read your colleagues work and draw your own conclusions about it. Clearly, there are more variations of the above. I know, at my school, we fight about it all the time. I no longer care. People who know me, know me. People who don't, don't. But, I do endeavor to place my student's at schools I perceive as one in which they will be happy and successful.
kim boal
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From: Organizational Behavior Division Listserv [
OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Aarti RAMASWAMI [
ramaswami@ESSEC.FR]
Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 5:19 AM
To:
OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: [OB-LIST] seeking info regarding journal ranking
**My apologies for cross-posting**
Dear all,
At the outset, I would like to say that I completely understand that journal ranking information may be private in some departments and not in some others, but any information you can share regarding my note below would be very much appreciated.
I am discussing classification of some journals in my school that are currently unranked (e.g., Personnel Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Vocational Behavior, and Journal of Career Development). While there is Harzing’s Journal Quality List and ISI Journal Citation Reports, it would be very useful to know how other universities rank these journals.
It would be great if you could please email directly to me responses to the following questions in the table provided below, as soon as you possibly can, and I will send back the listserv a response compilation.
1) Rank/category of this journal in your school/department (e.g., A+, A, A-, 0+, STAR etc)
2) Highest-to-lowest categories of journals in your school/dept (e.g., A+ to C, or 0 to 4, or 1 to 4 etc) (please put in order of highest-lowest)
3) Examples of mgmt/OBHR/applied psych journals in the same category as this journal in your school/department
4) Examples of mgmt/OBHR/applied psych journals in a category higher than this journal in your school/department
To make it easier for compilation, I kindly suggest you to please send me your responses in the following table itself.
Journal Name
Your school name
Rank/category of this journal in your school/dept
Highest-to-lowest categories of journals in your school/dept
Examples of mgmt/OBHR/applied psych journals in the same category as this journal
Examples of mgmt/OBHR/applied psych journals in a category higher than this journal
Personnel Psychology
Journal of Organizational Behavior
Journal of Vocational Behavior
Journal of Career Development
Thanks much in advance.
Best,
Aarti Ramaswami
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Aarti Ramaswami | Assistant Professor | ESSEC Business School | Work: +33-1-33-43-39-49