An ICT4D Journal Ranking Table
Richard Heeks · Research Explorer (The University of Manchester) · 2010
In most academic aelds, there are journal ranking lists. Some may be qualitative and subjective, created by polling academics working in the aeld. Others are quantitative and more objective, such as those created within ISI’s Web of Knowledge Journal Citation Reports. In the sub-discipline of information and communication technology for development (ICT4D), we have neither. Polls have not been conducted, and our specialist journals are not included in ISI’s journal database. This is problematic for at least two reasons. First, those of us working in the aeld and wishing to reach out to an ICT4D-speciac audience have no sound basis on which to select one specialist journal in the aeld over another. Second, we have no sound basis on which to compare publication in ICT4D specialist journals against publication in “mainstream” disciplinary journals. With this in mind, I have set out to create an ICT4D journal ranking table. The table is based on citation data and includes some comparative data from disciplinary journals. The arst task was to select “ICT4D specialist” journals. These were selected on the basis of title by identifying all journals with titles that combine some reference to ICTs or some component part or synonym, with some reference to development (as in “international development”) or either developing countries or regions dominated by developing countries. That provided a list of 16 current journals (see Table 1), though one could not be included in the ranking, as it has too recently started publication. A key factor for any author in determining where to publish is the likely impact of their article, something that is usually proxied via a measure of overall journal impact. Since no such measure exists for ICT4D journals, it had to be created. Google Scholar was selected, rather than one of the narrower databases such as Web of Knowledge or Scopus. Google Scholar tracks a broad range of citations of published papers and—unlike other databases—this integrates use in academic journals, conferences, working papers, and online reports. In other words, it provides a measure of impact that spreads beyond academia, with some incorporation of publication in, for example, international agencies. It was decided to measure impact for two years: 2008 (recent, but not so recent that few items might be cited) and 2005 (many ICT4D journals are quite new, meaning that the earlier the second year, the fewer journals that could be included; 2005 was selected since 10 of the journals were publishing then). Google Scholar was searched for the title of all papers published by the journals in the given year (excluding editorials), and the number of citations recorded. From this, the average number of citations per paper for each journal could be calculated. Since citations rise over time, this agure was moderated by dividing it by the average