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Describes the process and outputs of the findings to date in a research project to determine quality in academic business journal publishing, sponsored by a major academic publishing house. Describes the refereeing/review process for journal articles, a study of quality indicators in established “academic” journals, and the same in “practitioner” journals. Draws conclusions for quality improvement in the journals surveyed based on the findings. Draws conclusions for other researchers and publishers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate UK academics’ views of the importance and prestige of journals relevant to library and information science (LIS) teaching and research.

A questionnaire, based on one used previously in the USA, was sent to UK academics involved in LIS teaching and research. The questionnaire asked respondents to rate the importance of 87 LIS journals, to suggest others that were of importance to them but that were not amongst the 87, and to identify the five most prestigious journals for promotion purposes. In addition, those journals were identified that had figured in institutional submissions to the LIS Unit of Assessment in Research Excellence Framework (REF).

While there was a fair measure of overall agreement between US and UK rankings of the 87 journals, with both highlighting the standing of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology and of the Journal of Documentation, some substantial differences were also noted. Evidence is presented for a strong locational component to academics’ assessments of journal prestige, and analysis of the REF2014 submissions demonstrates the highly inter-disciplinary nature of LIS research in the UK.

The sample size is small, comprising 30 completed responses.

This is the first study to report UK academics’ rankings of LIS journals, and to compare those with comparable data for US academics.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze author and methodological characteristics in top-tier publications in higher education. As the importance of research in the professoriate continues to grow and faculty face ratcheted-up expectations for prestige in their research, such data are important contextually and historically.

This descriptive study examines 587 articles within four top-tier higher education research journals from 2008 to 2012. Data were open coded and analyzed with a research team, resulting in an intercoder reliability of 0.96.

Results show most authors are assistant professors, overwhelmingly received PhD’s from very high research institutions (Carnegie classification), and currently work in similar institutions. Five degree-granting institutions accounted for 29.0 percent of publications in top-tier journals. Additionally, quantitative research accounted for 60.6 percent of published articles, with regression as the most commonly used analytic technique (34.7 percent).

This study examined only higher education faculty and institutions based in the USA as well as first authors.

These results are meant to provide baseline data for top-tier journals within higher education and might inform conversations about methodological acceptability, respectability of qualitative research, graduate education research requirements, journal editor trainings, and tenure and promotion criteria.

This paper provides an update to previous studies that examined publications in higher education within the last three decades. In addition, this study examines author characteristics, which previous studies have mostly excluded. This study offers empirical data to inform conversations about the state of research in top-tier publications within higher education.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into publication practices from the perspective of academics working within four disciplinary communities: biosciences, astronomy/physics, education and history. The paper explores the ways in which these multiple overlapping communities intersect with the journal landscape and the implications for the adoption and use of new players in the scholarly communication system, particularly open-access mega-journals (OAMJs). OAMJs (e.g. PLOS ONE and Scientific Reports) are large, broad scope, open-access journals that base editorial decisions solely on the technical/scientific soundness of the article.

Focus groups with active researchers in these fields were held in five UK Higher Education Institutions across Great Britain, and were complemented by interviews with pro-vice-chancellors for research at each institution.

A strong finding to emerge from the data is the notion of researchers belonging to multiple overlapping communities, with some inherent tensions in meeting the requirements for these different audiences. Researcher perceptions of evaluation mechanisms were found to play a major role in attitudes towards OAMJs, and interviews with the pro-vice-chancellors for research indicate that there is a difference between researchers’ perceptions and the values embedded in institutional frameworks.

This is the first purely qualitative study relating to researcher perspectives on OAMJs. The findings of the paper will be of interest to publishers, policy-makers, research managers and academics.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the journal impact rankings of the open access SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) database and the subscription‐based Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

The paper looks at the SJR database which offers essential scientometric information for more than 17,000 scholarly and professional journals based on data licensed from Elsevier's Scopus database and compares this with the JCR database.

The open access SJR database offers very informative new insights to complement those that have been provided by the JCR for more than three decades by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and its successor, the Thomson (later Thomson‐Reuters) company. Especially valuable are its features of weighting the citations received based on the prestige of the citing journals, the (partial) exclusion of journal self‐citations, and the broader base of source journals. They provide new opportunities to analyse and understand their effects on the ranking of journals.

The paper provides useful information on the open access SJR and JCR databases and their effects on the ranking of journals.

The purpose of this article is to theoretically outline and empirically test two contribution-based indicators: (1) the scholars' annual contribution-based measurement and (2) the annual contribution modified h-index, computing six criteria: total number of papers, computed SCImago Journal Rank values, total number of authors, total number of citations of a scholar’s work, number of years since paper publication and number of annual paper citations.

Despite widespread scholarly agreement about the relevance of research production in evaluation and recruitment processes, the proposed mechanisms for gauging publication output are still rather elementary, consequently obscuring each individual scholar’s contributions. This study utilised the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution method, and the authors built two indicators to value author's contribution.

To test both indicators, this study focussed on the most productive scholars in communication during a specific time period (2017–2020), ranking their annual research contribution and testing it against standard productivity measures (i.e. number of papers and h-index).

This article contributes to current scientometric studies by addressing some of the limitations of aggregate-level measurements of research production, providing a much-needed understanding of scholarly productivity based on scholars' actual contribution to research.

The partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach for construction management (CM) scholars has become the preferred approach for its capability of assessing the complex relationship and relaxed normality and sample size assumptions. This paper systematically maps the structure of knowledge about PLS-SEM in CM using bibliometric analysis. Also, the study employs meta-analysis to explore how data and model characteristics, model evaluation and advanced modeling techniques have been utilized in the CM domain.

This study integrated two methods: bibliometric analysis on a sample of 211 articles identified using the PRISMA framework and meta-analysis on 163 articles identified based on the availability of full-length articles and relevant information.

The results revealed the leading knowledge formation entities (countries, institutions, authors, sources and documents). Also, the study employs full content analysis to identify six research themes, and meta-analysis is used to explore the use of PLS-SEM based on the following criteria: (1) reasons for using PLS-SEM in CM, (2) data characteristics, (3) model characteristics and evaluation and (4) use of advanced modeling and analysis techniques. Further, the study uses regression analysis and identifies “advanced modeling and analysis techniques” as the critical feature responsible for the publication in a journal with high scientific prestige. Finally, the study presented the comprehensive guidelines to be used by construction management scholars who wish to use PLS-SEM in their research work.

To the author’s knowledge, it is the first study of this kind to use PLS-SEM in CM research. This study provides an extensive analysis of the Scopus database and an in-depth review of the data characteristics, model characteristics and use of advanced modeling techniques in CM research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the variability of the impact factor (IF) and additional metrics in biomedical journals to provide some clues to the reliability of journal citation indicators.

Having used ISI Journal Citation Reports, from 2005 to 2011, the authors extracted 62 subject categories related to biomedical sciences. The category lists and citation profile for each journal were then downloaded and extracted. Coefficient of variation was applied to estimate the overall variability of the journal citation indicators.

Total citation indicators for 3,411 journals were extracted and examined. The overall variability of IFs and other journal citation measures in basic, clinical or translational, open access or subscription journals decreased while the quality and prestige of those journals developed. Interestingly, journal citation measures produced dissimilar variability trends and thus highlighted the importance of using multiple instead of just one measure in evaluating the performance and influence of biomedical journals. Eigenfactor™, Article's Influence and Cited Half Life proposed as more reliable indicators.

The relative variability of the journal citation measures in biomedical journals would decrease with a development in the impact and quality of journals. Eigenfactor™ and Cited Half Life are suggested as more reliable measures indicating few changes during the study period and across different impact level journals. These findings will be useful for librarians, researchers and decision makers who need to use citation measures as evaluative tools.

Where electronic journals will go in the immediate future depends on their relative advantages and disadvantages as seen by four participating groups ‐ authors, publishers, librarians and readers. Current developments are of crucial importance for deciding how speedily electronic journals will be introduced and accepted. Though the picture is changing rapidly, implementing electronic journals still holds problems for all four groups. Basic questions ‐ for example, of financial viability, or of long‐term storage ‐ still need to be resolved. These are not likely to be solved for all electronic journals in the same way. Some pointers to the future are becoming discernable, but it is still too early to see in detail how the transition from printed to electronic journals will develop.

This study aims to update knowledge of women's representation on the boards of scholarly management journals with a longitudinal analysis of the same over two decades.

This study extends the work of Metz and Harzing on women's representation in the editorial boards of 57 management journals from 1989 to 2004 by focusing on the development of gender diversity in editorial board membership over time. The authors first add another time period (2005‐2009) to Metz and Harzing's data. They then add empirical richness by conducting a more fine‐grained analysis of women's representation at the various editorial board levels over time. In addition, this study analyses the development of female editorial board memberships over time for five management fields, journals of four different ranks, and two geographic regions. As a result, this study examines women's representation in the editorial boards of 57 management journals over a period of 20 years (from 1989 to 2009).

The results showed an overall increase in women's representation in the editorial boards of these 57 management journals (at Board Member, Associate Editor and Editor in Chief levels) in the last five years (2004‐2009) to 22.4 per cent. Despite several positive trends identified in this follow‐up study, women's representation as editorial board members continues to be inconsistent across five management fields, across four journal rankings and across two geographic regions.

This study's findings clearly indicate that there is still much that can be done to narrow the gender imbalance in most editorial boards of management journals. Monitoring women's representation in editorial boards of management journals is only one of the steps needed for successful change to occur.

This study's findings matter for our society because editorial board membership is a sign of one's scholarly recognition and valued in academic promotion processes. It is important, therefore, that this promotion criterion be evaluated in the context of up‐to‐date knowledge of the representation of women in editorial boards of management journals, otherwise its impact on women's promotion could exacerbate an already discriminatory system of academic scholarship.

It is important to monitor women's (under)representation on the boards of scholarly management journals regularly to raise awareness that might lead to or sustain positive change. This follow‐up study serves that purpose in the field of management, a largely neglected field until recently.