Journal ranking- The tool to evaluate the quality of Journals

Journal ranking is widely used term in academic area in the evaluation of an academic journal's impact and quality. Journal rankings are intended to reflect the place of a journal within a specific field or area of research, the relative difficulty of being published in that journal, and the prestige associated with it. Many journals with good ranking have been considered as official research evaluation tools in several countries private and governmental organization.

 

Journal ranking "measures" or evaluations have been provided simply through institutional lists established by academic leaders or through committee vote, which many people feel that it is a biased way of ranking. In Modern academic scenario many institutions are in need of external sources for evaluation of journal quality, due to this need of external agency to determine the quality, governments, institutions, and leaders in research have come up with measures on the journal-level that can be used for assessment of quality and thus eliminate the need for subjective assessment.

Some of the Journal ranking "measures" or evaluations tools or techniques are given below

• Impact factor – reflecting the average number of citations to articles published in science and social science journals.
• Eigenfactor – a rating of the total importance of a scientific journal according to the number of incoming citations, with citations from highly ranked journals weighted to make a larger contribution to the eigenfactor than those from poorly ranked journals.
• SCImago Journal Rank – a measure of scientific influence of scholarly journals that accounts for both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance or prestige of the journals where such citations come from.
• h-index – usually used as a measure of scientific productivity and the scientific impact of an individual scientist, but can also be used to rank journals.
• Expert survey – a score reflecting the overall quality or contribution of a journal is based on the results of the survey of active field researchers, practitioners and students (i.e., actual journal contributors or readers), who rank each journal based on specific criteria.
• Publication power approach (PPA) – the ranking position of each journal is based on the actual publishing behavior of leading tenured academics over an extended time period. As such, the journal's ranking position reflects the frequency at which these scholars published their articles in this journal.
• Altmetrics – rate journals based on scholarly references added to academic social media sites.
• diamScore – a measure of scientific influence of academic journals based on recursive citation weighting and the pair wise comparisons between journals.
• JRank – JournalsRanking (JRank) is the digital portal developed by iMaQ Technologies Pvt. Ltd in 2015 containing list of all international journals indexed in ISI-JCR and Scopus-SJR based on the current impact factor (IF) and Quartiles (Q) given by Thomson Reuters and Scopus, respectively. The JRank also gives detailed information about the journal such as country of journal publishing, impact factor history, frequency of journal publishing, active web link etc.
• h5-index – this metric, calculated and released by Google Scholar, is based on the h-index of all articles published in a given journal in the last five years.

So this article aims to give brief idea about Journal ranking and the tool and techniques to evaluate the quality of Journals.

Er.Prof.AlokV Gaddi
B.E,MBA,(PhD)                      
Asst.Professor,
IEMS B-School,Hubli