Ranking Planning Journals

In March of this year Gordon Brown, head of the UK Treasury, announced that he was in favour of replacing the 20-year-old peer-review Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) with a simpler metric system. Following this, Sir Alan Wilson, director general for higher education at the Department for Education and Skills (and of urban modelling fame and founder editor of Environment and Planning A) chaired a committee that has just produced a report that scopes the alternatives (DFES, 2006). Brown's preferred method uses research income data, but the discussion is unlikely to stray far from questions of citations and journal rankings. Planning is a diverse field of study spanning economics, environmental studies, urban design, geography, urban studies, political science, sociology, architecture, property, and other subjects. This makes it difficult to devise meaningful rankings of planning journals. Indeed, it is difficult enough to devise a list of planning journals. In reality, academics working in planning work in specialisms that interface their applied area with mainstream disciplines. An article published on planning in a respected political-science journal is likely to be as well regarded by planning scholars, though not perhaps so well read, as one published in a core planning journal. There are a handful of spatial-planning journals that have the word `planning' in the title but these do not make up the body of literature that defines the field. Nor does the set of journals with `urban' in their title. In table 1, I have selected journals from five subject categories in the ISI Web of Knowledge Journal Citation Report database: environmental studies, geography, planning and development, transportation, and urban studies, these being the main ISI-listed journals that academics in planning tend to publish in and to read. The table ranks journals by an equally weighted combined impact factor and immediacy index, averaged over the five-year period 2000 ^ 04. The impact factor measures the average number of times that articles from a journal published over a two-year period are cited in the following year. It is computed by dividing the number of citations of a journal in year t by the total number of articles published in that journal in tÿ 1 and tÿ 2. An impact factor of 2.0 means that, on average, papers published one or two years ago have been cited twice in the current year. The count includes self citations (for example, papers in Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design in the past two years cited by papers in Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design in the current year), but most citing articles are from different journals. The impact factor is a more meaningful comparator than total citation counts because, to some extent, it accounts for size and frequency of publication. The immediacy index indicates how quickly papers in a journal are cited, and is computed by dividing the number of citations of a journal in the report year by the number of articles published by the journal in the same year. As with the impact factor, it tends to discount the advantages of large and frequently published journals. There are several problems with using these metrics. First, and most obviously, they do not include journals that are not listed in the ISI Web of Knowledge. A journal may not be listed by virtue of its newness or problems in the editorial or production process. There are rigorous eligibility criteria and it can take a while for a journal to gain or regain entry. The Town Planning Review, one of the oldest planning journals, is about to be listed following a period of production difficulties. It is an interesting feature of the journal Editorial Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 2006, volume 33, pages 485 ^ 490