List members might be interested in the initial rankings given to some
of the Journals mentioned below by the European Reference Index for the
Humanities.

The European Science Foundation through the HERA network has established
the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH). The ERIH is an
index of journals in 15 discipline areas, these lists aim to help
identify excellence in Humanities scholarship and provide a tool for the
aggregate benchmarking of national research systems, for example, in
determining the international standing of the research activity carried
out in a given field in a particular country. However, as they stand,
the lists are not a bibliometric tool.

Eleven of these lists have been published and are available for review
with a further four to be published shortly. The page through which the
lists, guidelines and feedback forms can be accessed is:

http://www.esf.org/research-areas/humanities/research-infrastructures-in
cluding-erih/erih-initial-lists.html

Scroll down and click on the History PDF

I compared the rankings given by ERA for the Journals mentioned and the
initial findings of the ERIF.

ERA rankings
A*:
Historical Journal
Journal of Contemporary History
Journal of Modern History

A:
War in History

B:
Journal of Military History
War and Society

C:
International History Review
Journal of British Studies
Twentieth Century British History

ERIF rankings

It uses A, B, C ranking i.e. no A*.

ERIF
A
Historical Journal
Journal of Contemporary History
Journal of Modern History
International History Review
Twentieth Century British History
War in History
B
Journal of Military History
Journal of British Studies
War and Society (not ranked)

The ERIF seem more generous, and more along the lines that I would have
thought.

The second is from Ian Welch:

As a heavy user of journal articles on 19th China and missionary
history, I somehow missed the earlier discussion on this issue. Would
someone oblige me by forwarding the original list of journal rankings.
(ian.welch@anu.edu.au). Who was it, who used to say, “I thangyow?” A
quick test for British social historians, just to lighten our load for
a moment and a reminder of the fleeting nature of fame and therefore
research.

[** The original message, as it came to H-Albion, is posted below.
You will have to get in touch with Prof. Capet or track down the blog
he cites. Remember, you can also search the logs at http://www.h-net.org/~albion/
for missed postings. -- rbg **]

I suspect that those distressed by certain shortcomings in the list do
not transfer to missionary history, the graveyard of ambitious
academics, at least in Australia. Even religious historians, a fairly
rare breed in OZ, although invariably highly competent researchers,
rarely descend so far into the bog of career ignominity (a lovely
word, wish I was sure it actually fits!).

And that seems to be the underlying question, at least as I have
followed the thread so far. It all seems to depend on the deeper issue
of what constitutes importance in research. There seems to be a strong
value of managerial/economic utilitarianism underlying attempts to
rank journals, especially by the seemingly reasonable method of
citations. Utilitarianism is very prominent in all areas of academic
enquiry and has, in the end, not the goal of satisfying mere
intellectual curiosity but serving the ‘interests’ (however defined)
of the contemporary ruling social, cultural and economic elites.
Nothing new in that, of course, it is, and has always been,
inseparable from research when people are seeking funding.

But obviously, or is it not obvious other than to me, the number of
citations should be reviewed against values other than sheer
frequency. I’ll bet Canberra to a brick that anything that now
mentions ‘climate change’ gets lots of citations, such as that famous
scientific collective report now cited endlessly.

And the third is from William Anthony Hay:

Having missed the original posting [** See the previous message in
this thread. -- rbg **], my immediate reaction is to concur with Peter
Stansky for the most part and question the whole idea of
mathematically ranking journals. I think most of us would agree that
journals vary, not least because they aim at different audiences. But
quantifying differences produces the bizarre results that Stansky
notes. The whole approach fits more with hard sciences and social
sciences than humane disciplines like history. Librarians and
administrators who don’t get what we do tend to push this approach as
an easy measure of assessment, so we are stuck with the task of
educating them to see whay it doesn’t work.

I think this is a totally shocking listing, particularly from the point of view of historians of Britain. In my view, the Journal of British Studies and Twentieth Century British History are deeply distinguished journals and that they should be ranked C rather than A demonstrates the fundamentally flawed nature of this sort of enterprise.

An easy way to correct for this would be to weight a publication’s value by the number of authors, i.e. a single-authored paper is worth 1, one with 2 authors is worth 1/2 to each author, one with 3 authors is worth 1/3, etc. But then people working in fields like particle physics, where there are hundreds or even thousands of co-authors, would complain … Maybe science and humanities just work too differently to be measured by the same metrics, but we’re measured using those drawn from the science model.

These is also a problem with assessment based on citations – we have science academics in my uni with over 13,000 citations while the top cited history staff only have a few hundred.

The other problem with all these journal based assessments is that papers in the sciences typically have multiple authors, including research supervisors, heads of dept and other bodies whereas a humanities paper is usually a solo effort. the Head of a productive dept in the sciences may accumulate many co-authored papers and many many citations, whereas his or her (hir?) humanities colleagues will have fewer.

Humanities academics really have to keep on making these points to the “bean counters”

Maybe JBS has declined in recent years? I’ve got a lot refs from it in my db, but only 1 after 1985.

I’m surprised that Journal of British Studies is ranked so low. I thought it was better than that.