IS Journal Quality Assessment Using the Author Affiliation Index

Abstract

Research productivity is one means by which academic units attain legitimacy within their institutional milieu and make their case for resources. Journal quality assessment is an important component for assessing faculty research productivity. We introduce the Author Affiliation Index (AAI), a simple method for assessing journal quality, to the IS domain. Essentially, the AAI of a journal is the percentage of academic authors publishing in that journal who are affiliated with a base set of high-quality academic institutions. Besides explaining the AAI, we demonstrate its use with a set of well-known IS journals, discuss its rankings vis-à-vis those resulting from other methods, and provide an example of how the basic AAI approach can be modified by changing the base school set that is used to define journal quality. The AAI has a number of advantages. First, it is a simple, low cost and transparent method for assessing any journal given a base school set. Second, it provides a consistent ranking of journals, particularly of those beyond the top consensus journals where less consistency is achieved with other measures. Third, it enables new journals to be rapidly assessed against more established ones without the lags or costs of other measures. The AAI provides another indicator of journal quality that is different from surveys and citation analyses.