Academic publishing in the Nordic countries – a survey of logistics and supply chain related journal rankings

Abstract

This paper reports a journal quality ranking survey of Nordic logistics and supply chain management faculty. The findings are compared with previous studies on journal rankings, which have primarily been conducted in the US. The paper examines the use of formal rankings as well as explores the attitudes towards open access (OA) publishing and discusses the relevance of journal rankings for assessing faculty research performance. The perspective taken is that of the Nordic countries, where arguably traditions regarding the type of research conducted in logistics and approaches to publishing differ from other geographical regions. Results show that formal journal rankings are increasing in significance in the Nordic countries, at the same time as OA publishing is gaining momentum. Yet, Nordic rankings for logistics and supply chain related journals differ from their US counterparts. Nordic rankings differentiate between three groups of logistics-related journals: business logistics journals, transportation journals, and operations research/operations management journals.