Move over APSR?
From Omar at Orgtheory.net
An interesting message from Christopher Zorn to the POLMETH listserve showed up at my desktop this morning. It appears that the 2007 impact factor of the methodology-heavy journal Political Analysis, “rose from 0.917 to 2.535, an increase of 176 percent.” That makes Political Analysis the top journal in Political Science, by-passing APSR. Now I understand-before you get all perklempt-that JCR impact factors are a problematic measure of “impact”, have criterion validity problems, not all of the relevant jourmals are included (and there seems to be no rhyme or reason for which journals get included) and are probably not even reproducible by third parties (we’ve covered some of this ground before; here, here, and here), and all the rest, but I still wonder whether this signals some permanent substantive change in the nature of the field (i.e. the Cambridge-led “political methodology” movement has finally made-over the discipline), or whether it is just another random JCR fluctuation (and yes, AJS and ASR are still the top impact journals in the 2007 rankings for sociology).
Comments
Has Political Analysis become more widely available or done anything unique to be promoted in the last year?
Posted by: Michael Allen![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.themonkeycage.org/nav-commenters.gif)
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June 19, 2008 06:06 PM
Is this because of Bear's article?
Posted by: Amanda Hugenkiss | June 19, 2008 07:18 PM
I'm sure they could bring their rating back down by implementing the delayed reviewing policy that is now becoming popular in political science.
Posted by: Andrew![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.themonkeycage.org/nav-commenters.gif)
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June 19, 2008 08:51 PM
Wow. And political science continues its flight from reality. Astonishing.
Posted by: Simon Kiss | June 20, 2008 02:47 PM
"Perklempt"?
Posted by: Seth Masket | June 22, 2008 07:44 AM
It is important to recognize how these journals calculate impact factor.
More importantly, that snapshot of the data excludes journals coded as "international relations" (the only IR journal on the list, JCR, is coded as both international relations and political science). Interestingly, both International Security and International Organization absolutely rock the American politics/methods journals when it comes to the "impact factor" statistic.
Given that IS does not publish actual social science articles all that often anymore, I think this says more about the ranking methodology than about which journal is actually #1.
Posted by: Scott Wedman | June 25, 2008 03:07 AM
It is important to recognize how these journals calculate impact factor.
More importantly, that snapshot of the data excludes journals coded as "international relations" (the only IR journal on the list, JCR, is coded as both international relations and political science). Interestingly, both International Security and International Organization absolutely rock the American politics/methods journals when it comes to the "impact factor" statistic.
Given that IS does not publish actual social science articles all that often anymore, I think this says more about the ranking methodology than about which journal is actually #1.
Posted by: Scott Wedman | June 25, 2008 03:11 AM