September 30, 2013, by Graham Kendall
Australian Business Deans Council (ABCD): Revised Journal List Announced
The Australian Business Deans Council (ABCD) has just announced its revsied journal list (in draft form at the time of writing). From their web site (About Us), the ABDC was:
“Established in 2002 to represent Australia’s higher education business faculties and schools, the ABDC is particularly concerned to improve Business education through curriculum development, and forging strong relationships with the business community and government. The Council also advocates research and development activity to enhance our understanding of business and the key drivers of economic activity, and is interested in how to how to achieve greater investment in the commercialisation end of science and innovation.
The ABDC endeavours to retain Australian business education’s leading position by keeping abreast of issues of quality assurance and accreditation activities worldwide. Active links are maintained with organizations such as the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) and the European Foundation for Management Development which manages the European Quality Improvement System (EQUIS).”
Although a national (Australian) inititative, it does give an important view of some of the important journals that are available to us.
There are, of course, differing views as to any ranking method and how they compare against other rankings. As an example, Technovation is the second highest ranked journal (and therfore a Q1) journal in the Operations Research & Management Science category (I choose this, as it is the category that I know the best) of ISI’s Journal Citation Reports. In the ABDC ranking it is an ‘A’ journal, rather than being in the top category of ‘A*’ (I purposefully chose a journal that I have not published in to try and remove any bias!).
No doubt, we could all look at the list (as well as the ISI and Scopus ranking; as well as the many others than exist) and provide observations as to where they are wrong, inconsistent etc. However, they do provide a mechanism to highlight the journals that are seen as important, and may have an effect on your career progression!
The final comment I would make is that we should not be beholden to a single type of ranking although we do have to pay special attention to ISI Web of Knowledge and Scopus as these are the two bibliography databases that are currenty used by MyRA. So, please treat the ABDC council as a source, an important source, of reference rather than a definitive guide, as is the case with any such list. As always, choosing which journal to submit to is a multi-criteria problem where the various factors are difficult to align into a single decision, although a single decision has to be made!
ABDC ranking journal list contains a lot of preadatory journals ( see more at https://scholarlyoa.com/2015/01/02/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2015/), for instance, Asian Social Science is a predatory journal that is excludef from Scopus. But it is still ranked at C. However, other SSCI indexed Journals such Estudios De Economia is ranked at C. I is so funny.
I have emailed to ABDC journal magagers and request that to exlude all predatory journals from the list and all SSCI indexed journals must ranked at least B.
Kind Regards
Tuyến