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.





I will just dump some of SCIMago's journal data for 2010 for journals and then interpret them a bit.

PAR

Cites / Doc. (4years) 2,22
Cites / Doc. (3years) 1,63
Cites / Doc. (2years) 1,30
References / Doc. 40,85
Cited Docs. 179
Uncited Docs. 171

PAR articles have a short term (2 year) impact of 1.3 citations/document but the impact grows to 2.2 when we consider a longer window of 4 years.  Each article cites 41 references on average. For every article in PAR that gets no citations, there is about 1 article that never gets a citation.  Lets compare this to some other journals.

JPART

Cites / Doc. (4years) 3,38
Cites / Doc. (3years) 2,89
Cites / Doc. (2years) 2,59
References / Doc. 63,38
Cited Docs. 76
Uncited Docs. 24
 
JPART articles are cited at a much higher rate from the start with roughly twice the impact in the 2 year window.  The advantage shrinks in percentage terms but the 4 year average is still over 1 higher than PAR.  Interestingly, JPART articles cite an average of 63 other articles.  For every article in JPART that is never cited, there are 3 that are cited at least once.

Let's compare these numbers to some journals in related fields.  I will start with PSJ since I am on its editorial board.

PSJ

Cites / Doc. (4years) 1,74
1Cites / Doc. (3years) 1,71
Cites / Doc. (2years) 1,71
References / Doc. 45,41
Cited Docs. 62
Uncited Docs. 49

PSJ compares favorably to PAR but is well behind JPART.  The latter is not a surprise.  PSJ articles cite 45 references per article, which is similar to PAR and well behind JPART.  For every article that is not cited about 1.3 articles are cited.  Again this is better than PAR but well-behind JPART.

JPAM

Cites / Doc. (4years) 1,70
Cites / Doc. (3years) 1,56
Cites / Doc. (2years) 1,50
References / Doc. 28,12
Cited Docs. 87
Uncited Docs. 120

I am a little dubious.  Previous numbers I have seen from other sources put JPAM in the low 2s on impact.  These numbers put it in the mid-1s.  In fact, these numbers put JPAM behind PSJ.  As a member of the editorial board of PSJ, I hope this is right but I am skeptical.  Interestingly, for every article that is not cited in JPAM there are about .75 of an article that is cited.  This seems quite low.  There are more papers no one ever cites than papers that people do cite.  I wonder if the denominator for this data source includes some book reviews, case studies, or other commentary that appears in JPAM that is not intended to "count".  Also note that the average article cites only 28 references.

I am not sure what to conclude from all of this except that my efforts to publish in PSJ have been entirely justified and PAR has a great deal of ground to make up.  I am hoping that the end of the "special section" strategy for PAR (where there were a number of special sections like biographies, book reviews, and public document reactions that were not citation generating -- by and large) will help PAR crawl back up the impact rankings.

I recommend you play with the tools available at scimagojr.com to compare journals of interest to you as well.