Reputation management: Evaluating journals for publication and impact Page 199 - Developments in Business Simulation and Experiential Learning, volume 41, 2014 REPUTATION MANAGEMENT: EVALUATING JOURNALS FOR PUBLICATION AND IMPACT Sheila Hoover Texas Tech University sheila.hoover@ttu.edu ABSTRACT Reputation management is the practice of strategically placing academic journal articles in such a way as to get them noticed, read and cited. The purpose of reputation management is to raise the academic profile of the individual and the institution that he or she works at. It involves a deliberate effort to submit your articles to the most prestigious journals, commercial, society or open access, which will get your research noticed. You must open your research to the greatest possible audience you can. Use the tools at your disposal to become familiar with the most prestigious journal outlets in your field and write up your research with those journals in mind. Get tenured and promoted, network with an eye towards getting invited to talk about your research. Volunteer to serve as a reviewer for a journal you plan to publish in, join an editorial board and begin to shape the world for your own students. INTRODUCTION For the ABSEL gathering in Orlando in 2014, a new track was added to the list of issues relevant to ABSEL scholars --- Accreditation Standards. This track, by focusing on interpretations of accreditation standards, allows for the defense of the adoption of experiential curricula, as well as the defense of experiential efforts as sound pedagogy regardless of accreditation standards. High impact educational practices were also entertained as appropriate to this track. This paper focuses on reputation management and the evaluation of journals for publication in support of that mission. REPUTATION MANAGEMENT AND ACCREDITATION AGENCIES Reputation management is about understanding and influencing an individuals’ reputation. For universities, colleges and faculty this has been a central focus for as long as there have been institutions of higher education. Many universities use the academic reputation measure in their goals and strategic plans. This type of measure is often driven by accreditation agencies. An example of an accreditation agency is the Association of American Universities (AAU). The AAU is an organization of 62 of the most prestigious universities in the US and Canada. It was founded in 1900 to advance the international reputation of universities in the United States. Following the role of an accreditation agency, the AAU sets standards for its member organizations. Their documentation (Association of American Universities, 2013) lists the following indicators for membership in the AAU: competitively funded research support, membership in national academies, faculty awards, fellowships and memberships and citations. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) is a regional higher education accreditation agency. It grants accreditation to degree granting colleges and universities in the south-eastern United States. Their mission statement is taken from the SACS home page (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, nd) : “The mission of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges is to assure the educational quality and improve the effectiveness of its member institutions.” SACS core values, which it expects its members to uphold, include: integrity, continuous improvement, peer review, self-regulation and accountability. The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), which will be familiar to all business faculty members, uses academic impact as one of its metrics in evaluating and granting accreditation to colleges of business. These metrics include number of publications in leading peer-review journals, citation counts, download counts and editorships, editorial board memberships and journal reviewers. Blaise Cronin (Ding & Cronin, 2011), former dean of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, stated recently that indicators of academic reputation include publication and citation counts; with an indicator of prestige being peer recognition. It is not a coincidence that the peer recognition criteria adopted by the AACSB looks a great deal like the indicators for AAU membership. THE JOURNAL ARTICLE AS CURRENCY So what do ABSEL scholars need to know to further their careers and to lend credence to ABSEL scholarship? ABSEL scholars need to remember why they publish and why where they publish is so important. Why do you publish your research in a journal? The journal article is the Page 200 - Developments in Business Simulation and Experiential Learning, volume 41, 2014 currency by which you and your peers evaluate your work. Peer reviewed academic journals are the official public record of an academic discipline. Journals represent the archival record of a discipline. Through bibliographic citations, the journal title, article title, year, volume, issue and page numbers, your article is given an address and instructions on where to locate the article that have been standardized for decades. Current electronic publications have a DOI, a digital object identifier. A DOI is a permanent address to the article on the Web, even if it changes servers. Articles published in journals are validated by experts through peer review, usually blind peer review. This allows excellent research to be published regardless of the author or the institution the author represents. Reviewers read the paper and evaluate it for scientific validity, look at how it is organized and ensure it is well written and easy to understand. Journals are mediums for disseminating information. Authors want their work published, read, indexed and cited. One can subscribe to a journal and receive issues as they are published. Libraries subscribe to journals, bind them and keep them in order for easy access. Indexing and abstracting services include information about the article, usually the bibliographic information and abstract, in their regular publications. These services now take the form of databases. Particularly useful databases in business and management include Proquest’s ABInform and Ebsco’s Business Source Complete. Articles are also included in citation databases, like Elsevier’s Scopus or ThomsonReuters’s Web of Knowledge. Citation indexes include the articles contained in the bibliography of the article being indexed. When searching a citation database, it is easy to find related articles through co-citation analysis. In other words, who is also citing the papers you have in your bibliography. Finally, journals award prestige to authors, editors, referees and publishers. To have an article published in what your department or college considers an A publication is one of your highest goals as an academician. The author receives accolades through promotion and tenure determinations in his or her department and university. Editors get the prestige of serving on the editorial board for a prestigious journal and reviewers get to include it in the service portion of their CVs. Good consistent reviewers can become members of the editorial board, an indicator of their growing reputation in their field. Publishers will often include the impact factor for a journal on the journal web page. With a strong impact factor, the journal is sure to attract the best authors and papers. Journals with strong impact factors and strong faculty support are usually protected when university library’s look to their journals in an effort to curb costs. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY PUBLISHING MODELS In the 21st century, there are a variety of publishing models. The most wide-spread publishing model today is the subscription model via the commercial publisher and the society publisher. Major commercial publishers include Reed Elsevier, Springer, Sage, Taylor and Francis and Wiley. Examples of major society publishers include the Academy of Management, American Marketing Association, the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineering. The author writes and submits a paper, the editor arranges for the peer review process, the article is accepted and published in the journal. Costs are borne by the subscribers, individuals and libraries that pay to receive the journal issues as they are published. This traditional model is well known and is well rehearsed. However, it does not stand alone any longer. The new model is open access publishing. Open access publications include SageOne (http://sgo.sagepub.com/), PLoS One (http://www.plos.org/) and the International Journal of Business Science and Applied Management (http://www.business-and-management.org/about.php), which makes a point on its web page to point out that this journal is indexed in Scopus and EBSCO. Another example of a journal moving to an open access platform is the Bernie Keyes Library. ABSEL is investigating moving the BKL onto the Texas Digital Library open journal system (personal correspondence). The open access movement has its roots in the preprint and post-print exchanges used by physics and mathematics faculty and graduate students in the mid-20th century. Their goal was to get their articles disseminated to the researchers that were most interested in their research, whether they subscribed to the journal it was published in or not. By the 1990s this had morphed into e-print exchanges and finally at Los Alamos National Laboratory, it became the LANL Preprint Archive. It migrated to Cornell University in 1999 and contains over 500 million articles. It is now known as arXiv.org. University libraries began to build institutional repositories and encouraged the university community to deposit copies of their published research in these repositories so anyone could view them. This ran into problems with copyright holders, the publishers, immediately. A movement began to protect authors’ rights to their intellectual property. Many universities, like Washington University in St. Louis, now provide faculty members and graduate students with information on how to retain rights to their intellectual property(Washington University of St Louis, 2013), including the right to reproduce and distribute copies of their research. Recently, universities like Harvard, MIT and the University of California System issued statements, written by their faculty senates, which would require all authors at those institutions to deposit copies of all their papers in the http://sgo.sagepub.com/ http://www.plos.org/ Page 201 - Developments in Business Simulation and Experiential Learning, volume 41, 2014 university’s institutional repository. They want the research product of their faculty and graduate students to be noticed. Through search engine optimization techniques, they can get these collections noticed. For instance, Texas Tech University has an institutional repository, called Think Tech, which is on the Texas Digital Library platform. TDL is interlinked with many different sites across the world and because of that connectivity; papers on Think Tech are getting more hits. Then, last spring, the Digital Public Library of America was founded. TDL contributes indexing to all its collections to DPLA, which because of its connectivity, gets TTU papers and dissertations even more notice, TTU papers are more discoverable and have a better chance to be downloaded, read and cited than ever before. Now let’s talk about the Bernie Keys Library. Originally distributed to attendees of the conference on CD -rom, it was inaccessible to those who did not attend the meeting. The BKL was made accessible on a web site, hosted by Wayne State University. This is a nice site, searches can be performed, and articles can be retrieved and read. Articles in the Bernie Keys Library were never picked up by a main-line indexing and abstracting service and searching in Google Scholar is incomplete at best. Suppose the BKL was hosted on an open access journal platform with search engine optimization and with indexing shared with the DPLA. Discoverability and access to the BKL would increase dramatically. Your papers would have the opportunity to be downloaded more often and the potential to be cited more often. This would have the effect of getting ABSEL noticed through its conferences and publications. It would get ABSEL scholars noticed. This brings us back to the purposes of an academic publication or journal publication. You establish precedence for your research and disseminate your research around the world. Outcomes could include individuals being solicited to submit papers in other quality publications, the profile of ABSEL would increase resulting in more and better papers being submitted for the annual conference and there is the potential to attract new scholars to conferences as well. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the major US- funded supporter of biomedical research announced (National Institutes of Health, 2013) that it was changing the rules for publishing research that was supported by government funding. The NIH decided that since the research that was being published based on government funding, which in turn is funded by the US taxpayers and written by faculty at institutions of higher learning that paid for the salaries, labs, graduate students and infrastructure to support the research, the institutions and the taxpayer should not pay for the research again in the form of journal subscriptions and access fees. In 2008, the NIH required that all authors supported by NIH funding submit final, peer reviewed copies of their publications to PubMed, and that these papers be made publicly available no later than 12 months from the date of publication. PubMed is the open access portal for the biomedical sciences. There are two major models for open access publishing, gold and green. Gold open access journals provide immediate access to all of its articles on the publisher’s web site. The cost of publishing an article in a gold open access journal is paid for by the author, the funding agency or the author’s institution. The green open access model allows the author to publish the article in a journal and self-archive a copy of the article for free public use in an institutional repository, a central repository, PubMed, or another open access web site. Open access publishing fees can range from $150 to $5000 per article. In this information rich environment, how does one know where to place his or her paper for publication? Does one publish in a commercial or society supported journal or in an open access publication? The answer to both these questions is, one does ones homework. A recent study (Tenopir et al, 2011) states that the most valued characteristics in choosing an article to read and cite, is online availability, author and type of journal. Scholars do not want to pay out of their own pocket to read articles, In order to read your article, their institution must subscribe or it must be an open access publication. Use the tools available to you, including your colleagues, your department, your department head and the databases and information resources that will help you evaluate the quality and impact of the journals you are considering for submission of an article. The remainder of the paper will focus on these tools. TOOLS FOR ANALYSIS AND JOURNAL PLACEMENT Your first resource to help determine where you should place your publication is your colleagues, your department and your college. Many departments and colleges have raked lists of journals broken out by perceived prestige within your discipline. Your colleagues may include editors or members of editorial boards of important journals. In any case a thorough review of the information for authors section of the journals should be considered carefully. This is also a good time to begin inspecting editors and editorial boards. Who are they? Where do they publish? What organizations are they affiliated with? Also look at authors being published in the journal and their affiliations. Begin with journals you are familiar with and move outward, by discipline and by publisher. Here are some tools that can help you. Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and Web of Knowledge are published by Thomson Reuters. JCR provides ranked lists of journals by discipline and impact factor. Lists can be organized by subject or by publisher. The impact factor is determined by dividing the number of articles from a particular journal that are cited in a given two year period by the number of articles published in the same journal during the same two year period. The result is a number that stands for the frequency which a given article in a Page 202 - Developments in Business Simulation and Experiential Learning, volume 41, 2014 journal will be cited in the two years after it is published. The higher the number, the greater the impact that journal has in its discipline. Journals are only included in JCR if they are included in the Web of Knowledge database. The impact factor as an evaluator of journal quality comes into question when editorial practices require authors to cite articles from previous issues of the journal to which they are submitting their article. The Web of Knowledge is made up of about seven interdependent databases. For citation searching focus on the Web of Science portion of the database, which indexes 12,000 of the most highly cited journals published. Web of Science continues the print indexes, Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index which started in the 1950s. Eugene Garfield, founder of the Institute of Scientific Information, created the Science Citation Index by including the cited references information from published papers. This allows researchers to move back and forth in time as they explore the citation database. Citations are the formal, explicit linkages between papers that have particular points in common. A citation index is built around these linkages. It lists publications that have been cited and identifies the sources of the citations. Anyone conducting a literature search can find from one to dozens of additional papers on a subject just by knowing one that has been cited. And every paper that is found provides a list of new citations with which to continue the search. (Garfield, 1979) Although the database coverage only goes back to1981, the literature covered by the database goes back into early printed books and manuscripts. Performing a citation search on the author, taylor fw (for Frederick W. Taylor) and restricting publication years to the early part of the 20th century, yields 39 cited works, including 49 citations to his Principles of Scientific Management published in 1913 and 1916. This kind of searching allows the researcher to see who else is citing a paper that they are citing and what citations they have in common with other authors. The beauty of the Web of Science is in the variety of searches and results you can get from it. If you know an author, you can do an author search or a cited reference search. If you know a topic or subject, you can search this interdisciplinary database for that topic. Your results can be viewed in a number of different ways. You can choose last in first out, to get the most recent articles first. You can choose relevance ranking, number of times cited or you can choose to have your results analyzed for you. You can get a report of the source titles by frequency, for ideas on where to submit papers, the authors or organizations, which allow you to look at your competition or search for prospective coauthors. One of the most interesting features of this database is the citation mapping. From an article record, choose citation mapping, and get a graphical image of the papers your target article has cited and been cited by. Each connection is a link that allows you to explore more articles. Scopus is a product of Elsevier, the enormous Dutch publisher. Its 50 million records from 21,000 journals make it an important destination for research. The largest part of the database is the portion from 1995 to the present, if the research you are interested in predates 1995, be sure to supplement your search in the Web of Science and one or two of the subject databases. In addition to giving access to individual articles, it includes where those articles have been cited subsequent to publication. One of the strengths of the Scopus database is the ability to disambiguate authors. Authors with the same name are distinguished by institutional affiliation and subject area. So in my search for Frederick W. Taylor, I would not have to limit by the years he was active, because the Scopus database separates individual authors with the same or similar names. Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar all report on the h-index (Hirsch, 2005) for individual authors. The h- index is an attempt to quantify research productivity and an individual’s impact in their discipline. The h-index for an individual will vary according to the database used. Because the h-index is time sensitive, you will not see the same results from Web of Science and Scopus, because the years of coverage and titles covered differ. Tools for evaluating open access journals and publishers include the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Scholarly Open Access (http:// scholarlyoa.com/). DOAJ includes over 10,000 open access journals. It includes information on the editors and editorial board and links to the journal itself, so you can use your skills to assess the journal, its editors and authors. Scholarly Open Access is a blog maintained by a librarian at the University of Denver. This site gives you a place to search for information on open access publishers. His specialty is providing information on open access publishers whose practices are unsavory and predatory. CONCLUSION The point of searching in these bibliographic and citation databases is to identify quality publications which would be appropriate outlets for your scholarly publications. The tools mentioned in this paper are just some of the databases you could search for information. Take some time, set up a search strategy, when you find some results, run the results through another database and analyze your results. Put the databases through their paces, search by author, author affiliation, subject and source title or publication title. Look at the h-index for scholars in the field, compare it to your h-index and put together a strategy to increase your h-index and your visibility in your field. These strategies make you as a scholar look better and makes your institution look better through reputation management. Page 203 - Developments in Business Simulation and Experiential Learning, volume 41, 2014 REFERENCES Association of American Universities. (2013). AAU Membership Policy. 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