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!

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.)

(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.