Why I Refuse to Rank Scholarly Journals
I was recently asked to submit my ranking of a journal in my field of research to a panel of deans who had been tasked by their association to decide which journals belong to various categories on the basis of research published in them. I wrote to them to explain why I am reluctant to do so.
I hope you will forgive me for this unsolicited submission and my attempt to suggest that, on balance, ranking of academic journals, when used for the purpose of evaluating scholarly contributions of individual members of faculty, does more harm than good. Research is about ideas, innovation, and discourse. Not surprisingly, it calls for constant questioning of what we are doing, and why. By the time some line of work acquires the status of orthodoxy on the basis of method, theory or perspective, it is hardly worth doing any more. Most of what is done for the purpose of promotion and tenure is not worth doing, and the world might as well be better off if the resources were devoted to teaching and other endeavors. For this reason, I think that continual injection of new experimental journals into any discipline is an essential feature of keeping it alive as a scholarly field.
By their definition, new journals take time to become widely recognized, perhaps not until they have developed their own special orthodoxy. For this reason, ever since I started getting requests from friends in British universities in the 1980s to rank academic journals in economics, finance, and accounting, I have refused to do so as a matter of principle. My rationale is that these journal ratings become substitutes for actual reading of scholarship, and hurt critical discourse by transferring the responsibility to read and form our own opinions about each piece of scholarship from each of us to editors and referees. Not surprisingly, this process has created journals whose sole purpose is to help people get promoted, and few people read them (except those who are looking to be promoted by the published authors). Even the most highly rated journals publish a lot of what I regard as trash. Unfortunately, journal rankings just promote and glorify that process.
In an ideal world, people will write when they have an idea they are excited about, publish it when the idea appears to be of interest to others also, and it will be accepted or rejected by the readers on its merits. Screening by journal ratings does incalculable harm to scholarship.
I do not expect to persuade you on how much damage your well-meaning effort may inflict on scholarly discourse. I hope you will encourage "rebellious" ideas in every discipline, not treating articles like a cut of lamb to be assessed on the basis of the store they bought it from.
During my visit to a university recently, I had a conversation with a young colleague next door who said that she keeps her papers secret until they are published for the fear of being rejected by A journals for having been "published" on the internet, or being scooped by others. Something is seriously wrong here. Whatever else our journal culture does, it is not devoted to promoting scholarly discourse. And that is a tragedy. I hope your Council will give its attention to this matter.