Journals in the Discipline: A Report on a New Survey of American Political Scientists

A long with books, scholarly journals constitute the primary media through which political scientists communicate the results of their research to their discipline. However, not all journals are created equal. There is a hierarchy of scholarly journals in political science, with some journals being highly respected and others less so. Articles published in the most highly regarded journals presumably go through a rigorous process of peer review and a competition for scarce space that results in high rejection rates and a high likelihood of quality. Articles published in these journals pass a difficult test on the road to publication and are likely to be seen by broad audiences of interested readers. Other journals publish research findings that are of interest to political scientists, to be sure, but articles published in these journals either pass a less-rigorous test or are targeted to narrower audiences. The purpose of this paper is to report on new findings relating to how political scientists in the United States evaluate the quality and impact of scholarly journals in their discipline. Based on a survey of 565 political scientists who are on the faculties of both Ph.D.and non-Ph.D.-granting departments, we consider subjective evaluations of the scholarly quality of 115 journals of interest to political scientists, as well as the degree to which political scientists are familiar with journals and are hence likely to be exposed to the findings reported in articles published in those journals. Following the work of Garand (1990) and Crewe and Norris (1991), we also create a journal impact rating that combines information about subjective evaluations of journal quality with information about respondents' familiarity with those journals. While some research on journal quality in political science has focused on the citation rates of scholarly journals (Christenson and Sigelman 1985), perhaps the most widely cited approach for evaluating journal quality and impact is one based on subjective evaluations of journals, as measured in surveys of political scientists (Giles and Wright 1975; Giles, Mizell, and Patterson 1989; Garand 1990; Crewe and Norris 1991). Giles and Wright (1975) pioneered this approach with their initial study, which examined political scientists' subjective evaluations of 63 political science journals; Giles, Mizell, and Patterson (1989) followed up with a reassessment of the evaluations of 78 journals, including 56 journals included in the first survey. Garand (1990) notes that the rankings of journals reported by Giles et al. (1989) include some interesting anomalies. In particular, some journals with very narrow audiences and foci are ranked highly by Giles et al. based on the high evaluations received from their relatively narrow readerships. The result is that some journals are ranked highly, even though a large majority of political scientists are not familiar with them and "not necessarily because they are highly visible and broadly recognized for the qualit of the scholarship contained w hin their pages" (Garand 1990, 448).l Garand's solution is to measure journal impact in a way that takes into account both the subjective evaluations given to particular journals and the number of political scientists who are familiar with these journals. This approach is adopted by Crewe and Norris (1991) in their study of the impact of British, European, and American political science journals. In this paper we follow the approach adopted by Giles and colleagues in collecting data on journal evaluations, as well as the approach adopted by Garand in creating a measure of journal impact. Our rationale is simple: we suggest that a journal's impact is a function of both the quality of research published in its pages and the degree to which its findings are disseminated broadly to the political science profession. Two journals with equally strong evaluations will have different impacts on the profession, depending on how many political scientists are familiar with and exposed to their articles. We realize that an effort to rate the quality and impact of scholarly journals is controversial, particularly given recent debates about what constitutes a valued contribution in political science and the role of journals in reflecting the values of the discipline. Admittedly, the notion of combining evaluations and familiarity into an impact rating reflects a subjective value about journal publications, but we suggest that these underlying values are not unreasonable ones. Our intention is not to denigrate the contributions published in journals with relatively narrow foci and/or readerships. Rather, we merely point out that articles published in such journals, even if they are of high quality, will be seen by a smaller number of political science colleagues and are less likely to have as strong an impact on the political science discipline. We also suggest that there is some value in having research read by numerous scholars, especially when the broad readership crosses subfield boundaries. The potential for cross-fertilization that occurs when research findings are subjected to the scrutiny of numerous scholars and from different subfields is likely to enhance the quality of research. Arguably, the research of scholars in a given subfield is improved when it is read and evaluated by scholars from American politics, comparative politics, political theory, and international relations. This