Playing the citations game

✍ Scribed by Neal M. Ashkanasy

• Book ID: 102389957
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 61 KB
• Volume: 28
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0894-3796
• DOI: 10.1002/job.476

✦ Synopsis

As can be seen from the table, JOB maintains a respectable Impact Factor compared to JoM, JOOP, and OBHDP, but is not really competitive with AMJ, JAP, or SMJ. Also, JOB is ranked #12 in the Thomson/ISI Journal Citation Report list of management journal titles, and #7 in the applied psychology list. These results are consistent with subjective ratings of journals in the field (e.g. Zickar & Highhouse, 2001), and place JOB in the top 20 journals in management and in the top 10 in industrial and organizational psychology.

But is this good enough? As I stated in my editorial to Vol. 28, Issue 2 (Ashkanasy, 2007), my aim as Editor-in-Chief is to improve on JOB's current position as a well respected, but not top-level, journal in our field. I want to make JOB the journal of choice for scholars working in the field of organizational behavior research. The fact is, however, that improvement in JOB's perceived attractiveness is not going to occur overnight. Clearly, if there is going to be improvement, then JOB's citation rate is going to have to lift, and this can really only realistically be accomplished if articles published in this journal attract the interest of scholars, and are then viewed as conveying scholarship that is actually worthy of citation. 1 Some readers may ask whether it is appropriate to place so much emphasis on the Thomson/ISI Impact Factors. Indeed, in this respect, a point of criticism is that Thomson/ISI calculate these factors on the basis of citations recorded only in journals included in the Web of Science TM lists (see http:// scientific.thomson.com/products/wos/), which comprises just a subset of the journals in our field. 2 As Amin and Mabe (2000) argue, however, the true impact of a journal is much more complex than this, and often depends on the particular field of research and the nature of scholarship in each field. In this respect, Norrisa and Oppenheim (2007) have also pointed out that there are now alternatives to Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1 Of course, there are other less meritworthy means to increase citation rates, such as artificially inflating same-journal citations and limiting the number of non-scholarly publications (such as editorials!). This journal and its publisher, however, do not endorse or engage in such shenanigans. a Listed in alphabetical order. b IF ¼ Impact Factor, from Thomson/ISI Journal Citation Reports TM . c SSCI ¼ Social Sciences Citation Index TM . d PoP ¼ Google Scholar TM accessed using Publish or Perish software. e Hirsch (2005).

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