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Here are some thoughts on entrepreneurship journals (with some others for comparison) as they are treated in the two year Journal Impact Factor (JIF) as they were recently updated in the Web of Science. These are the 2012 numbers.

For many purposes, such as publisher websites, the two year JIF is treated as THE citation measure. As we teach our students, multiple measures are preferable. Fortunately there are others: the five year JIF, the Google Scholar (Publish or Perish) citations that can be rendered in two and five years to parallel the JIFs, and two published by Scopus: the SNIP and SJR.

These other measures become useful when looking at the 2012 JIFs. The International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (IEMJ) was included for the first time this year. It placed fourth overall in both "Business" and "Management" with an astonishing JIF of 5.053. In our recent 2013, 19(3) article on our journals in the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research, John Cotton and I used all of these measures plus the h-index, when available. With these measures, the IEMJ placed 8th, 12th, 9th, 5th and 12th among entrepreneurship journals - not the wider set of business and management journals. We suggested an overall rating of AB. In other words, by these measures it is a very solid journal. However, we should treat any one year's worth of JIFs - or any other measures - with some reservations.

Reservations are called for in some of the measures of our other journals. Here are the comparisons between last year's and this year's two year JIFs, with a few other journals that moved quite a bit year to year:

As you can see, several journals changed rather little, but a few journals made rather odd leaps upwards. The Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal fell considerably. What I am suggesting is that, just as we should be somewhat skeptical about large leaps upwards, we should also be skeptical about large leaps downwards.

All of these figures are means, and hence susceptible to outliers. Does this apply to, say, SEJ or Management Decision (MD)? That is, did the previous period of SEJ have one or two unusually highly cited articles and the most recent period of MD have the same? In the MD case, I think this might be so. I see three unusually highly cited recent articles are picked up by Web of Science. I also see two such articles in the earlier period for SEJ. In short, these large shifts need to be placed in the context of a mean-driven metric: they appear to be driven by a very small number of articles.

In short, insofar as citations are an indicator of where we might want to publish, it is best to use multiple measures and to take more than one year into account.