Making Sense of Entrepreneurship Journals: Journal Rankings and Strategy Choices

Dozens of peer-reviewed, English language journals are currently published in our field. How ought we to evaluate them? This paper seeks to answer this question. To do so, we utilize both relevant literature and data on Entrepreneurship journals. The literature derives from both information science and other research areas that reflect on their journals. The data derives from six citation measures from Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science. We find 59 currently published English language, peer reviewed journals in Entrepreneurship. Contestable judgments based on their impact measures suggest that one of these 59 could be considered as “A+, four as “A”, five as “AB”, eight as “B”, four as “BC”, 23 as “C”, thirteen as “barely detectable”, and one as “insufficient data but promising”. Journal rankings affect the resources and prestige accorded to business schools, disciplines and subdisciplines, and individual scholars. However, the need to fit evaluations to school strategy implies that no rating system, ours included, is definitive. Multiple measures are needed, letter grades are misleading, and journal rankings should match the institution’s strategy and priorities in stakeholder service. A wider purpose of this study is to alert readers to the range of current methodologies and the limits of conventional rankings. Our conclusions appear innocuous, but standard practice is to use restrictive measures, to employ letter grades, and to prioritize only one stakeholder: scholars. These practices are poorly suited to the Entrepreneurship field

Evaluate Your Business School’s Writings As If Your Strategy Matters

Business school publications are widely criticized for their lack of managerial or teaching relevance. One reason for this criticism is that business school scholarship is typically evaluated purely in terms of one type of work: academic journal articles that are meant to be read by other scholars. However, academics produce multiple types of publications, and business schools serve a wider range of stakeholders. These other stakeholders are often central to the schools’ purposes and may be critical in acquiring resources. These stakeholders probably prefer to see scholarship that is relevant for students or for practitioners. They may prefer scholarship that is ethically relevant or regionally relevant and otherwise different from the model that dominates U.S. journals. Technologies are now available to measure the impact of writings in a much wider range of venues than covered by the Social Sciences Citation Index in the Web of Science. Moreover, a wider range of measures, such as the size of writings’ readership, may be needed. We consider these issues and present some recommendations, arguing that faculty evaluations should follow an intentional strategy and not necessarily conform to the traditional default

Language Ideologies, Choices, and Practices in Eastern African Hip Hop

Hip hop emerged as a musical and cultural force during the late 1970s in the United States and has followed a global trajectory ever since. Artists and fans around the world filter North American hip hop styles through their own local musical, social, and linguistic environments, making hip hop a highly visible (and audible) example of the intersection of global and local youth cultures. Young people in Tanzania and Malawi, neighboring African countries in the eastern region of the continent, are no exception to this creative process. Both countries have vibrant hip hop communities that draw on youth knowledge of international, as well as local and national, hip hop music and culture. Youth in the two countries listen to the same popular American stars and hold similar ideas about and interpretations of their lives and music. Yet, Tanzanian and Malawian hip hop scenes diverge in the social and cultural significance of local musical practices, which include performing as well as dancing, dressing, and talking about rap music. This tension between the similar and the different serves as an analytic backdrop for what follows

Does “Evaluating Journal Quality and the Association for Information Systems Senior Scholars Journal Basket…” Support the Basket with Bibliometric Measures?

We re-examine “Evaluating Journal Quality and the Association for Information Systems Senior Scholars Journal Basket…” by Lowry et al. (2013). They sought to use bibliometric methods to validate the Basket as the eight top quality journals that are “strictly speaking, IS journals” (Lowry et al., 2013, pp. 995, 997). They examined 21 journals out of 140 journals considered as possible IS journals. We also expand the sample to 73 of the 140 journals. Our sample includes a wider range of approaches to IS, although all were suggested by IS scholars in a survey by Lowry and colleagues. We also use the same sample of 21 journals in Lowry et al. with the same methods of analysis so far as possible. With the narrow sample, we replicate Lowry et al. as closely as we can, whereas with the broader sample we employ a conceptual replication. This latter replication also employs alternative methods. For example, we consider citations (a quality measure) and centrality (a relevance measure in this context) as distinct, rather than merging them as in Lowry et al. High centrality scores from the sample of 73 journals do not necessarily indicate close connections with IS. Therefore, we determine which journals are of high quality and closely connected with the Basket and with their sample. These results support the broad purpose of Lowry et al., finding a wider set of high quality and relevant journals than just MISQ and ISR, and find a wider set of relevant, top quality journals