Most American business schools draw a distinction between general and specialty (or “field”) journals for specialties such as innovation. The best of the former are dubbed “A” journals, and at many “Top 25” schools, the only publications that count towards tenure are the “A” pubs.
In Canada and other places outside the U.S., the only journals that count are
the 45 journals used by the
Financial Times b-school rankings It includes the standard "A" journals in management, marketing, accounting and finance, and adds the three top managerial journals, two entrepreneurial journals and a few other less obvious journals. (No innovation journals are included).
All of these rankings are based on citation metrics, on the presumption that the more oft-cited articles are “better”, “more important” or at least more influential. The
expert in this field is Anne-Wil Harzing (who has
studied such metrics, makes
ranking software and has spent 15 years integrating the various
journal ranking lists). Here are some thoughts about different measures that might identify the “top” innovation journals.
Ranking of Innovation Journals
When writing my own work, working with co-authors, or mentoring junior scholars, I often ask (or am asked): where is the “best” place to publish this paper? Since my work — like those who care to ask my opinion — is almost entirely about innovation, the question is on finding the “best” innovation journal.
Fortunately, Tek Thongpapanl has provided hard data about innovation-related journals, using citations from articles published in leading innovation journals (Linton & Thongpapanl, 2004; Thongpapanl, 2012). To deal with the problem of
coercive citations — where editors of lesser journals demand citations to their journal as a condition of publication — he provides rankings with and without journal self-citations.
His studies suggest two top journals for innovation management:
Research Policy and the
Journal of Product Innovation Management.† The next tier are more difficult to define, but the most recent study suggests (in alphabetical order)
Industrial & Corporate Change, R&D Management and
Technovation. (Both studies ranked highly
Research-Technology Management, a journal that tends to publish more firsthand managerial papers than academic studies.)
† I'm not saying this because I have articles coming out in both this year. I would have said this in January 2012 when I received a preprint of Thongpapanl (2012).
Journal Citation Reports
Another source of rankings are the
Journal Citation Reports, published by Thomson. I used 2012 data to search for Business, Finance, Economics, Information Science, Management and Sociology journals.
From the top 100 journals (sorted by 5-year impact factor), below are selected FT, innovation, entrepreneurship and strategy journals. (Journals marked * are part of the FT 45; innovation journals in
bold.)
1. Academy of Management Review*
2. Journal of Economic Literature
3. Academy of Management Journal*
4. Quarterly Journal of Economics*
5. Journal of Management
6. Administrative Science Quarterly*
7. MIS Quarterly*
12. Strategic Management Journal*
13. Journal of Finance*
16. Journal of Marketing*
20. Organization Science*
30. Journal of Management Studies*
32.
Research Policy
35. American Economic Review*
39. Org Behavior and Human Decision Processes*
45. Journal of Business Venturing*
54. Information Systems Research*
55. Strategic Organization
62. Journal of Marketing Research*
65. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice*
67.
Technovation
74. Organization Studies*
80.
Journal of Product Innovation Management
82. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal
85. Management Science*
In other words,
Research Policy is equivalent to AER,
Technovation to
Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice and
JPIM to
Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (and ahead of what many consider the gold standard,
Management Science).
The next highest innovation journals are
R&D Management (156) and
Industrial and Corporate Change (162), roughly equivalent to two leading specialty journals,
Human Resource Management (155) and
Small Business Economics (157). Rounding out the top 250 are the
Journal of Technology Transfer (206) and
IEEE Transactions in Engineering Management (218).
Unlike Tek’s measures, these do not include corrections for self-citations, so the rankings of journals with high self-citation rates should be taken with a grain of salt.
Ranking by h5-index
A final metric are the
Google Scholar Metrics, a family of tools based on the Google index of journals, conference, working papers and monographs. The latest metrics “are currently based on our index as it was in July 2013.”
In particular, it offers metrics based on the
Hirsch h-index. As Google
explains
The h-index of a publication is the largest number h such that at least h articles in that publication were cited at least h times each. For example, a publication with five articles cited by, respectively, 17, 9, 6, 3, and 2, has the h-index of 3.
h5-index is the h-index for articles published in the last 5 complete years. It is the largest number h such that h articles published in 2008-2012 have at least h citations each.
Harzing and
Daniel Baker discuss the merits of the h- and h5-index.
Based on the 2008-2012 data, Google has compiled
a list of the top innovation and entrepreneurship journals:
Top publications - Entrepreneurship & Innovation
h5-index is the h-index for
articles published in the last 5 complete years. It is the largest
number h such that h articles published in 2008-2012 have at least
h citations each.
hide
h5-median for a publication
is the median number of citations for the articles that make up
its h5-index.
hide
| Publication | h5-index |
1. | Research Policy | 73 |
2. | Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice | 52 |
3. | Journal of Business Venturing | 51 |
4. | Technovation | 47 |
5. | Small Business Economics | 46 |
6. | Journal of Product Innovation Management | 39 |
7. | Journal of Small Business Management | 35 |
8. | R&D Management | 34 |
9. | The Journal of Technology Transfer | 31 |
10. | International Small Business Journal | 27 |
11. | Journal of Intellectual Capital | 26 |
12. | International Entrepreneurship and
Management Journal | 26 |
13. | Entrepreneurship and Regional Development | 25 |
14. | Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal | 23 |
15. | Technology Analysis & Strategic
Management | 22 |
16. | Economics of Innovation and New
Technology | 22 |
17. | European Journal of Innovation Management | 22 |
18. | International Journal of Innovation
Management | 21 |
19. | Industry and Innovation | 21 |
20. | International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research | 21 |
Dates and citation counts are estimated and are determined automatically by a computer program.
If you compare this to
the overall list of “Business, Economics and Management” journals, it produces a stunning conclusion. With an h5-value of 73,
Research Policy ranks after 8 finance and economics journals (including AER, J. Finance, J. Financial Economics and QJE). However, it ranks ahead of
all strategy and other management journals, including SMJ, AMJ, MISQ,
Management Science, J. Marketing and
Organization Science.
What does this mean? It means that
Research Policy — unknown to most tenure committees — has more high-impact articles than but a handful of the “A” journals that count for tenure at most schools.
Conclusions
My friends and colleagues in innovation, entrepreneurship and other specialties can be divided into three categories
- Those who play the “A” game, either because they believe in it or because they feel they can’t beat the system.
- Those who reject the whole journal ranking game as being an imperfect proxy for research quality, and argue for direct measures of article quality (such as article citations).
- Those who believe the current “A” system undervalues quality research in so-called “B” journals, and thus want to use the rules of journal and article “quality” to gain greater recognition for good work published elsewhere.
If asked by a junior scholar what to do, I would point out the strong interaction effect between his/her choice of publishing strategy and the sort of employers they select (or that select them).
References
Linton, Jonathan D., and Narongsak Tek Thongpapanl. "Ranking the Technology Innovation Management Journals."
Journal of Product Innovation Management 21, no. 2 (2004): 123-139. doi:
10.1111/j.0737-6782.2004.00062.x
Thongpapanl, Narongsak Tek. "The changing landscape of technology and innovation management: An updated ranking of journals in the field."
Technovation 32, no. 5 (2012): 257-271. doi:
10.1016/j.technovation.2012.01.001