Ranking the International Business Journals: A Reply
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David M. Reeb AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
I
n the comment about our ranking of international business journals, we were impressed by the passion of Professor Inkpen and intrigued that this service article had generated such debate. To briefly recap, we sought to identify and rank 30 journals in the international business domain. Our approach was to use both citation analysis and a survey of perceived journal quality. Our motivation was that while we have an understanding of the relative ranking of journals within our respective foundation disciplines and how JIBS fits into such rankings, we did not have any insight into the relative pecking order of IB journals. As such, we sought to remedy this situation and share this analysis with our colleagues. Professor Inkpen was disturbed by this analysis and argues our article is not of substantive importance. We will address his comments in the order presented.
The IB Silo Concern Professor Inkpen suggests that we wish to resurrect the debate about the legitimacy of IB as a research field. Yet, the underlying premise of our analysis is that IB is indeed a legitimate field of
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research in it’s own right, which justifies the ranking of IB journals; we are taking it as a given that IB is a legitimate field of inquiry. Professor Inkpen next argues that by ranking IB journals we are suggesting that IB research should only be published in pure IB journals. Not only did we not intend to imply that sentiment but explicitly state the opposite in the original paper in noting the importance of international research published in foundation discipline journals. Furthermore, the suggestion that the only relevant issue is the relative impact of IB journals to other disciplines suggests that IB is not a legitimate field. For example, we have yet to see a ranking paper in finance indicating that finance journals are important because of how well they fare against IB journals (or any other). Thus, we are puzzled by the charge that we are trying to resurrect the debate about IB legitimacy as our approach takes its legitimacy as a given, while the alternative seeks to continue justifying IB relative to other disciplines. The inference that ranking IB journals implies that IB researchers should only “look inward” for research ideas seems inappropriate. Does this mean that since some researchers and schools have
BUSINESS STUDIES, 32, 1 (FIRST QUARTER 2001): 197–199
197
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ranked management journals that these authors are suggesting that no one ever consider economic theory for inspiration. We take a less dogmatic view. Our perspective is that ranking journals is a much less suggestive endeavor and instead simply gives researchers some metrics for evaluating IB journal quality.
Journal Quality Professor Inkpen argues that the quality gap between JIBS and the other IB journals renders our analysis useless. Yet, his starting point is the quality difference that we document and report. As such, we would need to know the results of our analy
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