Discussion: View Thread

Responses to our article on rating journals have countered with desires to use the ratings at top U.S. business schools.  This makes sense if and only if three conditions hold:  (1) your best strategy is to emulate what you think these schools do, (2) their ratings are sufficiently convergent that you can copy them, and (3) the actual practice of top schools matches these lists.

(1) There are opportunity costs in this strategy, as some schools have succeeded with differentiation, and clearly only some schools can feasibly take this approach.  My co-author and I have a sister article forthcoming in Business Horizons called "Evaluate your business school's writings as if your strategy matters".  It is in process of being posted on our library site, so I won't go into detail here.

(2) Our ratings article covers the perceptual biases and other reasons this is unlikely.  Further, Dean Shepherd's list of how about 200 schools - many of them major research schools - evaluate JBV shows a range of approaches.

(3) We show how this does not account for actual tenure patterns at major business schools.  We also note a particular case of the discrepancy between scholarly impact and adherence to journal lists - Howard Aldrich's record - citing an interesting paper by Sean Patrick Saßmannshausen.  These are among our arguments for the value of so-called "B" journals.

Apparently the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (SEJ) looms large in responses to our results, as its citation record does not match perceptions.  SEJ is a young journal, and hence disadvantaged, which is why we list the start year for each journal.  We do not claim that citations are perfect indicators, just better than the alternatives.

We have no illusions that objective approaches such as ours will make much of a dint in the mythology of journal ranking.  However, we do provide support for those who want to think through their publishing strategy.