The latest Thomson Reuters Scientific Inc. 2-year Impact Factors (IF-2) have just been released, and it's good news for JOB. JOB's 2008 IF-2 is at a record 2.44, which places it at #6 in Applied Psychology and #16 in Management.
For those of you not familiar with this index, it is calculated as the number of citations in 2008 to JOB articles published in 2006 and 2007, divided by the number of ''citable'' articles published in those years. ''Citable'' articles include articles, reviews, and proceedings papers, but exclude editorials, corrections, and commentaries. 1 One hundred two citable articles were published in JOB in 2006-7 (83 articles, 14 reviews, 5 proceedings papers), and the total number of citations in 2008 to all JOB articles published in 2006-7 was 249; so that 249/102 ¼ 2.44. The most cited articles in this period were Mathieu & Taylor (2006) and Glick, Miller, & Cardinal (2007). 2 Congratulations to these authors.
Even better news is contained in the recently introduced 5-year Impact Factors (IF-5). 3 JOB's 2008 IF-5 is the number of citations in 2008 to JOB articles published in 2003-2007 (983), divided by the number of citable articles published in those years (250), which equals 3.93. This puts JOB at #4 in Applied Psychology and #14 in Management. In fact, the IF-5 index is much more appropriate for journals in the social science disciplines, where submission-to-publication time is normally around two years, while the IS-2 is more suited to science journals, where the time from submission to publication can be less than six months. Most cited in this time frame were Schaufeli & Bakker (2004) and Gagne & Deci (2005). Congratulations also to these authors.
That is not to say, however, we should become too euphoric about this result. As I pointed out in an earlier editorial (Ashkanasy, 2007), there is still a big gap between JOB and the top echelon journals such as the Academy of Management Journal (2008 IF-5 ¼ 6.08) and the Journal of Applied Psychology (2008 IF-5 ¼ 3.77). JOB is indeed doing well, but there is still some ways to go before it becomes the journal of first choice for scholars of organizational behavior.
A further issue to be considered is that Thomson Reuters Scientific recently added a slew of new journal titles to the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). This was to meet recent criticism that the