Public Management Journal Comparisons Reconsidered

I have decided to conduct a more detailed assessment of journal rankings and impact factor in public management. I discussed the raw impact factors in a previous post.  I have been able to locate more specific data that reveals some interesting patterns.

Jobs in PA and Homeland Security at VCU

I am still working on how to post the PDF flier I got, but Virginia Commonwealth is looking to hiring multiple people for tenure-track positions in Public Administration, Homeland Security, and some other fields. 

I will try to clean this up - but for now here is a pasted version of the PDF.

A related post on the fragility of models based on poorly distributed data

As an aside to my discussion of ART and the fragility of high dimensionality models, you can find a related discussion in this post on Gelman's excellent statistics and political science blog.

His post relates to the fragility of even Chi-squared tests (among the most robust tests out there) in the face of data with odd cluster structures.   Public management survey research faces these sorts of odd clusters all of the time.  If Chi-squared can be fragile in these cases, multinomial probit does not stand a chance.

The moral of the story is know your data and your models.

Keep the eyeballs coming...and feel free to comment

I am continuing to develop posts for the blog despite the slow down.  The crazy number of interviews we are doing at the Bush School (current guess is 16 for five positions this year) and my work on a mixed-methods textbook has demanded much of my attention.. but I hope to post every week or two. 

Expect posts soon on the logic of LaTeX (that is, how LaTeX works and is different from Word) and the selection strategy for controlling confounding effects in Achen's ART (as applied to PA subjects).  I may cross-post some interesting

I am happy to report that I am slowly building up some visits (though few "subscriptions" -- but I think blog subscriptions are old tech).  I would love to see more reaction to the posts though.  Please do feel free to comment.

A Little Work on Journal Rankings in Public Management

For a variety of reasons, I have been thinking about how to systematize journal rankings in public management.  We throw around terms like "top tier", "second tier" and the like without much thought as to what they mean. 

As a rough start, I figured I would define the tiers along these lines.  "Top tier" means an impact factor of 2 or greater.  Second tier would include journals that have between an impact factor between 1 and 2.  Anything with an impact factor of less than 1 is clearly below that - "third tier" if you must.

The list from JCR (2010) for public administration turns up some interesting comparisons.  I am dropping journals that I have not heard of - often specific field journals (that may be quite good, but not really mainstream public management like the Journal of Climate Policy). 

Top tier:
JPAM (2.246)
JPART (2.086)


That's it.  No other listed PA journal gets a score above 2.  Given that JPAM publishes a vanishingly small number of management oriented articles -- I think of it as basically an applied economics journal at this point -- this means there is one public management journal in the top tier.

Second tier:
International Public Management Journal (1.95 - sooo close)
Governance (1.78)
Public Management Review (1.295)
Public Administration (1.292)
Public Administration Review (1.141)
American Review of Public Administration (1.00)

This has some interesting surprises.  PAR comes in near the bottom of the tier but I wonder if this is an artifact of the recent editorial approach to publish a number of non-traditional article types like administrative bios, public document analyses, and more extensive book reviews.  IPMJ, Governance, PMR, and PA are all strongly international journals.  It is interesting to see international journals dominate the top of the second tier.

Third tier: 

Administration and Society (.944)
Review of Public Personnel Administration (.891)
Public Administration and Development (.783)
Policy and Politics (.754)
Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management (.411)

This is a non-comprehensive list - but you can see the PA sub-fields start to come in.  Sadly Administration and Society -- a journal that used to be a popular general interest outlet -- has dropped to an impact level similar to subfield journals.  Incidentally, NVSQ is not listed as a PA journal (and there is no public management list) but it has an impact factor in this range of .648.

What does this mean?  Well, there are no public management outlets that compete with the top field journals in political science (APSR and AJPS have impact factors at or above 3).  Within public management, the hierarchy seems pretty clear.  There is a top tier -- JPAM and JPART.  The second tier includes a couple of domestic outlets near the bottom (PAR and ARPA) and a number of increasingly prominent European outlets (PMR, IJPM, etc.).  The third tier is mostly sub-field journals with some general journals that have little visibility (A&S and P&P). 

Mostly this tells me what we all need to write and cite more.  I strongly suspect that the average public management article has fewer citations than the average political science article (and not only trivially so because of PAR's book reviews, etc).  The norm of extensive citation create a public good for the field to inflate average citation rates for the journals.  We may have some of our "impact" diverted into books, but I don't think that explains the major gap between public management journals and political science or economics journals.

Any reactions?