I recommende everybod to read Geoffrey Crossicks article
"Journals in the arts and humanities: their role in
evaluation"
in Serials, November 2007 showing that peer-reviewed
journals are
not the self-evident location of choice that they are in
sciences.
The most presitious form of output in the humanites is still
the
monograph, thematic books, scholarly editions of texts and
judgment of peers remains the core way to establish the
quality
of research outputs.
What is the impact factor for Plato's The Republic, written
approxiamtely 360 BC. Still popular, still cited, still an
extremely important philosophical text.
Jan
Sandy Thatcher wrote:
> But the authors of the article I cited raise a very
crucial point in
> demonstrating that citation practices differ across
disciplines and
> subfields within disciplines. It surely makes no sense
to rank a
> journal higher, or keep subscribing to it, because
scholars in that
> subfield, like international relations, simply cite
more than their
> colleagues in other subfields. (If this were the main
criterion, I
> suppose law journals would always rank highly because
they contain
> massive numbers of citations, with many pages having
more footnotes
> than text, though of course we all know that they are
not really peer
> reviewed, being edited by law students.) This is one
among several
> reasons these authors put forward to argue for using
reputational
> analysis, too, in order to make up in part for the
shortcomings of
> pure citational analysis.
>
> The reductio ad absurdum of citational analysis would
be works like
> "The Bell Curve," which received a tremendous
amount of attention,
> most of it quite negative, or articles touting
"cold fusion," an
> equally controversial topic, or "intelligent
design." One would surely
> have to use scare quotes in describing any of these
kinds of works as
> having "value."
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State University Press
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