Academic journals are one of the main ways that scholars
disseminate the results of their research and create new knowledge.
As of 2010, it has been estimated there are over 28,235 refereed
journals. Of these, nearly 21,000 are available online. (1) There
are various methods to evaluate the relative rankings of academic
journals. These are aggregate measures and do not address the
quality of any individual article.
Ulrichsweb provides detailed information on over 300,000
periodicals, including academic journals. Some of the Ulrichsweb
data that can be useful in journal evaluation include reviews,
circulation, table of contents, and abstracting and indexing
sources/databases.
Cabell Publishing has detailed information on journals in
education, business, and psychology.
MLA Directory of Periodicals covers journals in language,
linguistics, literature, folklore, pedagogy, or film.
Acceptance rates:
The acceptance rate (also called the rejection rate) can be used
to measure the selectivity of a journal. It compares how many
manuscripts are accepted relative to the total number of
manuscripts submitted.
Cabell Publishing provides acceptance rates for journals in
education, business, and psychology.
MLA Directory of Periodicals provides data on articles
published versus articles submitted. Sometimes the acceptance rate
may appear on the journal's home page.
Citation indexing:
A journal's influence may be gauged by examining how often
articles in its pages are cited in subsequent research. One measure
of influence is the
impact factor, which shows the number of citations per article
per year. The Eigenfactor is an
alternate measure of journal influence that uses citation indexing.
All things being equal, Eigenfactor gives higher ranks to journals
that publish more articles. It also tries to remove potential
biases such as self-citing. In general, journal ranking using
citations is more prominent in the sciences, followed by the social
sciences.
Journal Citation Reports contains data on academic journals in
science, technology, and social sciences, including impact factor
and Eigenfactor.
In-cites
ranks journals using citation indexing. It contains data up until
2008. It has been replaced by ScienceWatch which also covers
research fronts, hot topics, and highly-cited authors.
Other rankings:
European Reference Index for the Humanities categorizes
journals by readership, influence and visibility. It concentrates
on European publishers and includes non-English language
journals.
Faculty of 1000 ranks biology
and medical journals based on how well it performs during
post-publication peer review. Free trials are available.
(1) Tenopir, Carol, Regina Mays, and Lei Wu. "Journal Article
Growth And Reading Patterns." New Review Of Information Networking
16.1 (2011): 4-22. Library, Information Science & Technology
Abstracts. Web. 2 May 2012.