Saturday, September 10, 2011

From the editors' desk...Hilary Bradbury-Huang on what's happened this summer...

Back from the summer break and what is top of mind is the newly calculated impact factor for the journal.  The calculation essentially answers the question: “if I publish with ARJ what are the chances that my paper will be cited?” Note that this is a separate question from “will it be read”?  The calculation of  impact factor 0.846 suggests that, on average, each paper we publish is cited almost once.  That may sound rather meager perhaps unless you know that the large journals have an average of 4 citations per paper. Because many have been around a very long time they naturally attract a higher readership. We also looked at how it performs relative to “similar” journals. As you know the journal is highly interdisciplinary and its is hard to know which is the best peer set.  However I was very pleased to find it among the top 100 organization & management journals, set of peer journals that is reasonably meaningful and that I – as an organizational scholar by discipline, know well.  So in a nutshell, not bad for ARJ, by publication standards, very much a “new kid on the block,” who, against all the odds, seeks to offer a platform for counter-conventional inquiry.    As to the easier to determine question of “are we read?”  The answer to this is readily seen on our own website with the download counts for popular articles.  Yes we’re read!  I hear we are very popular with those studying qualitative research because we give adequate space to descriptions of methods and processes. Onward and upward then to the important question of "what's next for us?" Given that the world probably doesn't need a periodical, yet we have a good one getting better, what is important for us in meeting what the world (or the international community of action researchers) does need?  To be continued...

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