There is a list of cautionary notes, and reference to an excellent website providing rankings of jouranals in a letter to the editor of OR/MS by John Mingers, Kent Business School, Univ. of Kent, U.K. (OR/MS Today, June 2005, page 20). He has been working with principle components analysis, studying a dataset of journal rankings in business and management that appear at the Harzing Web Site (www.harzing.com). Professor Mingers reports five concerns/issues/cautions about using "impact factors" alone to assess quality. I am summarizing his points:
1)some high quality journals are omitted from the assessment;
2) at least in the indices Mingers examined, broad audience is given more weight/credibility than narrow specialist audiences;
3) impact factors that used the last two years may "favor journals that publish in very current topics areas against those with long gestation periods or long publication lead times", perhaps favoring empircally based surveys and reviews over basic research;
4) journals with large readership, i.e., American journals, are (overly) favored;
5) and research quality and impact may be very different, as evidenced when comparing peer-assessed rankings with impact rankings.
These cautionary notes seemed a useful addition to the discussion.
For those of us unfamiliar with her work/site, Ann-Will Harzing (http:www.harzing.com/jql.htm), with the aide of several other contributors, has provided heroic service in collecting, organizing, and making available for individual use this information, "16 rankings on 879 journals". Her site provides rankings organized by journal name, by topic of the journal, and by ISBN number. If you have not made a visit to the site, its worth it.
Dick Butler
Mentor/Assoc. Professor
SUNY Empire State College