kata ta biblia

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Ranking Journals in Biblical Studies

I was motivated by a recent post and follow-up comment on Charles Halton’s blog regarding the ranking of journals in biblical studies. Angela Erisman responded in a comment with this advice:

Also, a better way to gauge the prestige of a journal than a list like the one you mention is simply to pay close attention to the footnotes in what you read. Journals that are frequently cited are the ones widely read in the discipline. This is where your work is likely to get the most readership, and these are probably the ones considered most important.

This seems like sage advice, and somewhat measurable. So, I decided to perform an imperfect experiment in searching for the importance of various journals by searching books. Google books has a vast number of biblical studies materials searchable and seems a good place to begin. So, below is a sampling of some of the major journals in which one may publish a New Testament article (my field), followed by my disclaimer of known imperfections in this method of ranking. What do you think of the results? How might we do this better?

  1. Journal of Biblical Literature (803 books)
  2. New Testament Studies (765 books)
  3. Journal of Theological Studies (742 books)
  4. Catholic Biblical Quarterly (720 books)
  5. Novum Testamentum (636 books)
  6. Journal for the Study of the New Testament (634 books)
  7. Biblical Archaeology Review (633 books)
  8. Biblical Theology Bulletin (620 books)
  9. Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der Älteren Kirche [ZNW] (618 books)
  10. Bibliotheca Sacra (457 books)
  11. Journal of Early Christian Studies (333 books)
  12. Bible Review (117 books)
  13. Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (96 books)
  14. Ex Auditu (23 books)
  15. Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus (18 books)

Already knowing that this is imperfect, I noticed more difficulties after beginning the searches. Some journals (like “New Testament Studies”) consisted of a very common phrase, so I limited the search to books that also include the standard abbreviation for that journal (e.g., “NTS”). I could not use only the abbreviation of that journal because some abbreviations stand for other things (e.g., JBL), which skews the results. I also removed the title of the journal from the title of the books, just in case the journals are indexed on Google books (some are and others aren’t). This search also does not discriminate in terms of dates. So, it could turn things up published in 1911 whereas another well-respected journal may not have begun at that point. I could modify the publication dates in the search, but I’d rather allow journals with longevity the benefit. The main problem I’m having with this list is that these searches only give me the amount of books that cite these journals, not the amount of citations within those books.

This ranking also does not account for the type of article you are submitting, another topic covered in Angela’s original comment.

All of that said, this is only a test. Help me figure out a better way of doing this sort of search.

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5 Comments by Patrick George McCullough  /  January 20, 2009  /  Posted in: biblical studies, journals, rankings
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  • http://heilsgeschichte.com Drew Strait

    thanks pat. this is a brilliant post. very helpful.

  • http://patmccullough.com/ Patrick George McCullough

    Well, I don’t know if I’d call myself brilliant. I only know that others have said such of my abilities.

    (Reference to Mrs. Elton — at least in the Hollywood version of Emma)

    Seriously, that’s good. I’m glad it’s helpful. I will have to keep thinking about ways to get it better. I would love to figure out how to search only the citations of a book. Amazon is able to say where a book is cited in other books. Google does something similar with Scholar, I believe. But with these services, it makes more sense to quote the full title of an article.

    I need to figure out how to search for the books that include the full title of the journal (say, at the beginning where abbreviations are noted) and then search within those books how many times the abbreviation occurs.

  • http://dcspinks.wordpress.com Chris

    Pat,

    Things this method does not take into account:
    1. FREQUENCY OF PUBLICATION: Some of these journals are quarterly; some are annuals; some may be less or more frequent than either of these. That is, a journal that is published more frequently will have more articles out in the wild for someone to cite, and therefore will show up more frequently in a search like yours.
    2. AGE OF JOURNAL: As you’ve noted, some of these journals have been around for ages; others are newer. The older ones, of course, will have more articles for one to read and cite, and therefore show up more frequently in searches like yours.
    3. SCOPE OF JOURNAL: A handful of these journals have a more limited scope or a specific target audience (ex. Interpretation). They are not likely to be cited as often in academic conversations because they don’t intend to contribute directly to academic conversations.

    A couple of questions:
    1. Is shear quantity a good indicator of “importance”?
    2. If one is going for the journal that is “likely to get the most readership” wouldn’t one want to submit to the journal with the largest subscription base, regardless of the number of times the journal is cited in books? (Subscription base will also likely play into the number of times a journal is cited. The more people reading an article the more of a chance the article has of getting cited.)

  • http://patmccullough.com/ Patrick George McCullough

    Thanks for the thoughts, Chris.

    To reply overall, the idea of this is: which journals are read more by scholars? I don’t see any problem with frequency. If they come out with more articles that and those articles are still noticed, that just goes to show that scholars in the field follow this journal closely.

    With the age of the journal, like I said, I don’t mind giving the benefit to journals that have been around longer. That just means that scholars have been reading this journal longer. Although, it does mean that they may not be reading it as much as they used to. In that case, I could modify the search to include only books from, say, 1990 on.

    As far as the scope of the journal, that was what I intended to address with my comment: “This ranking also does not account for the type of article you are submitting, another topic covered in Angela’s original comment.” In general, if you’ve got a New Testament article to publish, perhaps you could look at this list and see which ones would be the best fit and go for the higher ranking ones first perhaps.

    Subscription base would be a fabulous indicator! I have no idea how to get those statistics easily. Do you? On the other hand, it tells you how many people might be reading it, but not how many people think it’s important enough to interact with in their own scholarship.

    Thanks for the comments!

  • http://dcspinks.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/citation-based-ranking-schemes/ Citation-based ranking schemes « katagrapho

    [...] June 12, 2009 at 6:50 pm · Filed under Aside and tagged: Journals, Rankings As I was reading this Wired article about citation-based ranking schemes for identifying the importance of scientific journals (and of scientists themselves!), I was reminded of Pat’s post this past January, “Ranking Journals in Biblical Studies.” [...]