Journal Ranking AIDEA 2023

On the 19th of April 2023, AIDEA’s Board unanimously approved its new Journal Ranking. Though academics who belong to AIDEA work within a non-bibliometric field that adopts “peer review” as the leading method for research evaluation, AIDEA’s 2023 Journal ranking aims to provide a guidance regards the most “qualified” and highly “reputed” journals in which to publish ones’ research.
As scholars we are all aware that the “reputation” of ones’ publications and of the journals on which we publish our research is of primary importance and must be carefully preserved, whilst simply pursuing “quantitative metrics” of publications not only is senseless, but is often counterproductive. In particular, unethical practices, that foster the multiplication of publications, often through gift authorships, and/or the choice of publishing in “less challenging” yet apparently highly reputed journals, that however provide authors facilitated and non-rigorous review processes, have in time created notable negative spillovers for our scientific community.
Today, there is a growing concern both in academia and in its governing institutions (i.e. ANVUR in Italy) regarding these dynamics. As a consequence, there is an increased attention towards the monitoring of critical aspects that have emerged in apparently reputable journals (e.g., insufficient intervals of time between submission and acceptance of papers; the number of authors per paper; the growing number of special issues often with recurring guest editors) in order to single out and stigmatize practices of “bibliographic opportunism”.
Given this scenario, AIDEA’s Journal Ranking Commission developed in parallel an International and a National Journal ranking, and proceeded to integrate the results obtained into a single overall ranking.
The process has led to two journal ranking documents, one that refers to the communities represented by ADEIMF, ASSIOA, SIM, SIMA, SIDREA e SISR, and one referred to AISME. Both ranking systems use Scopus and WOS 2019, 2020, 2021 indicators and consider the classifications year by year. Also, all the journals present in the “Beall’s list” have been eliminated in both ranking documents.

The ADEIMF, ASSIOA, SIDREA, SIM, SIMA, SISR journal ranking is articulated in four quartiles and presents different sections, as occurred already for the JR used by the GEV 13b for the VQR 2015-2019 campaign. The sections have the following titles: P/07, P/08, P/09, P/11, P/10, “E” (Economics), “G” (Generalist),”MA” (Multisector - Business),”MS”(Multi-History). The AISME journal ranking is divided into percentiles and, on this basis, quartiles were identified.
The AISME journal ranking is divided into percentiles and, on this basis, quartiles were identified.

As for National Journals, in coherence with AIDEA’s guidelines approved on the 24th of Febbruary 2022, a new evaluation model was developed and implemented by AIDEA’s Journal Ranking Commisson.

The 22 Italian Journals that are of interest for academics within the range of AIDEA were evaluated with the support of the Journal Ranking Commissions of the single societies belonging to AIDEA according to their specific field of interest. The evaluations provided by the single societies were used by AIDEA’s Journal Ranking Commission to formulate an overall ranking of the Italian Journals in quartiles. Once approved, the result of the evaluations of the 22 Italian Journals was integrated into the rankings of the International Journals to form a single overall ranking of Iternational and National Journals.
The most relevant novelty introduced in AIDEA’s raking is to have singled out a selected set of Journals that are rated Q1*. This approach was adopted following the indications AIDEA’s Board had defined in 2022, regards the necessity to identify, within the wider cluster of Journals belonging to the first quartile Q1, a small set of Journals that may be considered particularly relevant and outstanding. Seeing as there are two AIDEA Journal ranking documents that refer to different communities, the approach followed to identify the Q1* set differed as follows.

The identification of the Q1* Journals in the ranking of reference for ADEIMF, ASSIOA, SIDREA, SIM, SIMA and SISR followed a qualitative, transparent and objective method that triangulated the following:

 Journals ranked 4 or 4* in the ABS 2021
 Journals ranked A* in the ABCD 2022, provided these journals were also ranked at least 3 in the ABS 2021
 Journals present in the Financial Times top 50, provided they were also ranked at least 3 in the ABS 2021 1
These criteria were applied to the journals present in all the AIDEA ranking sections for these societies with the exception of the those classified “E- Economics” or “G – Generalist”, as AIDEA’s Board and the Journal Ranking Commission convened that the journals that belonged to the highest levels of these sections are not central for the research themes covered by academics belonging to ADEIMF, ASSIOA, SIDREA, SIM, SIMA e SISR. The final outcome of this process led to the identification of 114 Journals belonging to the Q1* set, that correspond to 6,33% of all the journals considered in the last year (1802)
For the AISME ranking, instead, a purely quantitative method was applied, identifying the journals in the top-percentiles of their JR. The result was the identification of 43 journals in the Q1* set, that represent 5,87% of all the journals considered in the last year (733).

As for AIDEA’s future steps on this front, it will update its journal ranking in consideration of the new Scopus and WOS parameters. Furthermore, it will soon define a window (eg. December 2023-Jannuary 2024) in which academics may signal, through the academic society to which they belong, new journals to take into consideration for the adjourned journal ranking that we aim to publish in June 2024.

Michele Pizzo and Massimo Sargiacomo