A ranking list for information systems journals

There has been an increasing focus internationally on the quality and impact of research outputs in recent years. Several countries, including the United Kingdom and New Zealand have implemented schemes to base the funding of research on research quality. The Australian government is planning to implement a Research Quality Framework (RQF) in the next few years that will impact greatly on funding of research in Australian universities. A key issue for Australian researchers is how the quality and impact of research is defined and measured in their discipline areas. Although peer review is widely used to assess the quality of research outputs, it is expensive and labour intensive. Other surrogate quality measures are often used. This paper focuses on measuring the quality of research outputs in the information systems discipline. We argue that measures such as citation indexes are inappropriate for information systems and that the publication outlet is a more suitable indicator of quality. We present a ranking list of journals for the information systems discipline, and discuss the approach we have taken in developing the list. We discuss how the ranking list may be used in defining and measuring the quality of information systems research outputs, the limitations inherent in the approach and discuss lessons we have learned in developing the list.<br /

Forums For Accounting Information Systems Scholars

Previous studies ranking the quality of journals as a measure of the research contributions of accounting faculty have not served accounting information systems faculty well due to one or more of four problems: (1) the ranking included several highly-ranked accounting journals that publish few, if any, articles in the systems area;  (2) the results did not include a separate ranking for those who teach in the systems area;  (3) the survey did not include a sufficient number of journals from the information systems area that afford quality publishing opportunities for accounting faculty;  and (4) the survey was completed by many accounting faculty who have little knowledge of or interest in the accounting systems area. This study was undertaken to produce a ranking of journal quality specifically suited to judging the research contributions of accounting systems faculty.  The survey methodology addresses each of the four problem areas cited above, resulting in rankings that are substantially different from other studies.  Rather than the Accounting Review and Journal of Accounting Research leading the list of ranked journals, this study reveals that, for accounting information systems faculty,   a top-ranked publication would appear either in MIS Quarterly or Management Science, both non-accounting journals, as well as Journal of Information Systems (Accounting) or International Journal of Accounting Information Systems (formerly, Advances in Accounting Information Systems)

ERA distribution of information systems journals

The Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative being conducted by the Australian Research Council (ARC), mandates a single journal and conference ranking scheme over every academic discipline in Australia. A universal publication outlet ranking list mandated by a government agency is unique and has attracted interest and comment both within Australia and overseas. Equally, the interest shown has come from all sectors involved in academic publishing &ndash; authors, reviewers, publishers &ndash; and from commercial and open access publishers. This paper investigates the distribution of information systems journals over the various ERA parameters and comments on a claim of bias whereby the ranking of a journal is positively influenced by the number of years it has been in existence in the areas of information systems and business journals. Clear evidence of the diversity of the information systems discipline is observed. The benefits of a multidisciplinary foundation for information systems is also noted. Longer established journals are shown to attract higher rankings and possible reasons for and implications flowing from this are discussed.<br /

Ranking Operations Management Conferences

Several publications have appeared in the field of\ud Operations Management which rank Operations\ud Management related journals. Several ranking systems\ud exist for journals based on , for example, perceived\ud relevance and quality, citation, and author affiliation.\ud Many academics also publish at conferences but we have\ud not come across publications that rank conferences.\ud Conference rankings are generally more complicated than\ud journal rankings. Journal rankings are primarily for\ud publishing purposes. Conferences on the other hand are\ud attended by people for different reasons. In this paper the\ud first attempt is made in developing an operations\ud management conference ranking based upon author\ud affiliation. Ranking based on an analysis of author\ud affiliation assumes that one important motive for\ud participants is to attend a high quality research\ud conference. With that assumption it is reasonable to use\ud the author affiliation approach. Based upon an existing\ud ranking of institutes that offer operations management\ud programs a ranking list of affiliations is developed.\ud Subsequently, we compare several operations\ud management related conferences such as POMS,\ud EurOMA, OSCM and the Operations Management\ud Division of the Academy of Management based on that\ud ranked list of institutes. The results provide information\ud for authors that help in deciding which operations\ud management oriented conferences to attend

Between Cost Efficiency and Limited Innovation – A Scientometric Study of Business Process Standardization

While process standardization is a usual component in companies’ daily BPM toolkit research and practice still struggle to determine and realize the particular value and impact of process standardization for process performance especially independently from its drawbacks. As the basic idea of process standardization in research is spread across different fields a complete overview on this topic and its related benefits and drawbacks especially in Information Systems research is still missing. Therefore within this approach we provide a scientometric study including all publications of the JAIS ranking, the LSE ranking of IS top journals, the WKWI list for 2008 and the power publication approach for IS top journals. In total 80 peer-reviewed research articles of different fields such as information systems and management, different outlets, as proceedings and journals were identified and analyzed due to their methodology, relevancy, spreading and content

A Multi-Criteria Decision Making Approach to Journal Selection and Ranking

Selection and ranking of Journals is an important issue in research community because of the fast growing list of journals. This issue has been extensively attended to as a selection problem using different search engines and recommender systems. Unfortunately, though there are multiple conflicting criteria about the journal features, the selection problem has never been viewed as a multi-criteria decision making one. In this paper, journal selection and ranking is formulated as multi-criteria decision making problem and a new approach for journal ranking based on author's preference and preference selection index is proposed. The proposed approach has been verified with three cases in the field of Computer Science. Journal indexing, publisher, percentile, citescore and open access status were considered as journal attributes. Scopus and Science Citation Index Expanded are sources of the journal dataset. Selenium and Beautiful Soup were used as web scraping tools for capturing journal information. The case study results suggested different ranking results for each author, reflecting the effect of each author's preference rating of the journal attribute options. This study has been able to formulate journal selection and ranking as a multicriteria decision making problem and a ranking system has been implemented to support potential authors

Scientific Output from Latin America and the Caribbean – Identification of the Main Institutions for Regional Open Access Integration Strategies

Latin America is a region in which two thirds of the investment in research and development are funded by State resources. It can be foreseen that in the near future governments in the region will encourage and promote, or require by law or mandates, that scientific output from the region become visible and accessible in open access repositories and portals. This paper presents the results of a survey to identify the institutions of the region with the largest volume of scientific output and most exposure of their output on the Web, in order to help make those institutions visible to national, regional and international organizations involved in open access strategies and programs in Latin America and the Caribbean. The results show a leading position by universities from Brazil; a strong presence of universities from Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Venezuela, and some presence of universities from Ecuador, Peru, Costa Rica, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Urugua

Identifying Research Fields within Business and Management: A Journal Cross-Citation Analysis

A discipline such as business and management (B&M) is very broad and has many fields within it, ranging from fairly scientific ones such as management science or economics to softer ones such as information systems. There are at least three reasons why it is important to identify these sub-fields accurately. Firstly, to give insight into the structure of the subject area and identify perhaps unrecognised commonalities; second for the purpose of normalizing citation data as it is well known that citation rates vary significantly between different disciplines. And thirdly, because journal rankings and lists tend to split their classifications into different subjects – for example, the Association of Business Schools (ABS) list, which is a standard in the UK, has 22 different fields. Unfortunately, at the moment these are created in an ad hoc manner with no underlying rigour. The purpose of this paper is to identify possible sub-fields in B&M rigorously based on actual citation patterns. We have examined 450 journals in B&M which are included in the ISI Web of Science (WoS) and analysed the cross-citation rates between them enabling us to generate sets of coherent and consistent sub-fields that minimise the extent to which journals appear in several categories. Implications and limitations of the analysis are discussed

Metrics to evaluate research performance in academic institutions: A critique of ERA 2010 as applied in forestry and the indirect H2 index as a possible alternative

Excellence for Research in Australia (ERA) is an attempt by the Australian Research Council to rate Australian universities on a 5-point scale within 180 Fields of Research using metrics and peer evaluation by an evaluation committee. Some of the bibliometric data contributing to this ranking suffer statistical issues associated with skewed distributions. Other data are standardised year-by-year, placing undue emphasis on the most recent publications which may not yet have reliable citation patterns. The bibliometric data offered to the evaluation committees is extensive, but lacks effective syntheses such as the h-index and its variants. The indirect H2 index is objective, can be computed automatically and efficiently, is resistant to manipulation, and a good indicator of impact to assist the ERA evaluation committees and to similar evaluations internationally.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures, 7 tables, appendice