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?
No comments:
Post a Comment