A Methodology for Calculating Prestige Ranks of Academic Journals in Communication: A More Inclusive Alternative to Citation Metrics

Abstract

The problem of how to rank academic journals in the communication field (human interaction, mass communication, speech, and rhetoric) is one of practical importance to scholars, university administrators, and librarians, yet there is no methodology that covers the field's journals comprehensively and objectively. This article reports a new ranking methodology based in empirical criteria. The new system relates independent measures of the prestige of the field's doctoral departments to information about where faculty members from those departments have published scholarly articles. This new approach identifies the field's most influential journals as those that more frequently publish the work of the field's top scholars and programs as perceived by their peers. This system was used to compute prestige weights (P-weights) for 65 communication journals. P-weights were found to be strongly correlated with ISI Web of Science journal impact factor scores and can be used to identify an overall prestige hierarch...