Journal rankings continued

A recent piece in the Times Higher gives hope for those concerned about the impact of the EHIR’s journal list on research and how it is judged. The Higher reports that the EHIR is scrapping the controversial A-C gradings amid fears that these were being used to rank the research published in them hierarchically rather than assessing the quality of each article. To me, it does seem rather disingenuous (or naive if you are feeling generous) for Michael Worton to state:

We have been saying it until we are blue in the face that this is not about hierarchies but about category difference … (the change) will make everything a lot clearer.

In these days of management culture, targets and quick and easy methods of assessment, if you set out a system of categorising journals, of course people are going to say that an article published in English Historical Review is better than one in Annales de Normandie because for former is in the ‘A’ category and the latter in the ‘C’. Hopefully we can now all get back to publishing our research in the best places for that research.

After journal rankings what next?

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the news for those that haven’t read yesterday’s Times Higher Ed, that those crazy people at the European Reference Index have logically concluded that the next step from a journals’ ranking is to rank monographs!

Leading scholarly journals in history

For anyone else experiencing dilemmas as described in the previous post, I managed to find, buried in the AHRC website, a list of so-called leading scholarly journals drawn up in conjunction with the European Science foundation. It can be accessed here in the little table. Do I agree with all of this? Of course not.