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  • Journal 'Ranking' Issues and the State of the Journal in the Humanities:A 2009 CELJ Roundtable
  • Bonnie Wheeler
  • Falling into Rank:How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Journal Rankings
  • Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Dean of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English and Philosophy

American higher education has become obsessed of late with ranks and brands. It is not uncommon today to find university administrations creating strategic plans specifically aimed at increasing their overall and program rankings, and hiring marketing consultants to improve their branding. One reason for this is that rank and brand are used to lure students (as well as faculty and donors) to universities. College-bound high school students probably know more about university ranks and brands than about things they should know, like the names of all the US presidents or state capitals. College students themselves are most likely better at reciting the top ten football programs in America than the world's ten poorest countries. And graduate students aim to study at top-ranked schools, while faculty compete for positions at the top-ranked research universities. In this day and age, high ranking and iconic branding are seen as major keys to success and as irrefutable signs of excellence.1 Does this hold as well for scholarly journals? Or, better yet, should it? What value, if any, is there in ranking scholarly journals?

While most aspects of the American university have been hard hit by rank and brand 'fever,' a few have not yet been affected by it. In this essay, I would like to focus on one of them, and argue why I hope that it never catches the fever. The area that I'm thinking about is scholarly journals in the humanities. As an editor of two such journals—the American Book Review and symplokē—I perhaps have more at stake than most when it comes to journal ranking. High rankings of the [End Page 323] journals that I edit have the potential to increase the quality of the contributions to these journals as well as to increase their readership and sales; low rankings have the potential to drive potential contributors away from these journals to more highly ranked journals as well as to decrease their readership and sales—and few things are as sad as a journal that is seldom read and lowly regarded.

Nevertheless, my argument as to why we don't need rankings of humanities journals—at least at this particular time—has less to do with the individual success of the journals that I edit and more to do with the ultimate value of journal rankings. As we shall see, even though they may hold in some of the other disciplines, the stated reasons for ranking journals do not hold in the humanities. Journal rankings are neither a reliable sign of scholarly excellence in the humanities nor of very much value in disciplines such as philosophy or literary studies.2 However, assuming their continued and growing presence (as rank and brand fever shows no signs of breaking), journal rankings may play a useful role in transforming cultural attitudes toward the changing material conditions of humanities scholarship, and help usher in a new era of environmentally responsible scholarly journal publishing.

Against Rank

The practice of ranking scholarly journals is fairly widespread in the United States for just about every discipline except the humanities. It is one sign of the good health of the humanities that they have not caught rank-and-brand fever like many of the other disciplines in the American academy. Whereas one can readily find, for example, rankings of science or business journals, there is a roaring silence when it comes to rankings of humanities journals.3 Why?

For one thing, whereas in business and the sciences accreditation and funding are directly linked to publication in more highly ranked journals, in the humanities there is little accreditation and even less funding. If a business professor in an AACSB-accredited program does not publish in highly ranked journals, then she puts her program at risk of losing its accreditation. However, if a comparative literature professor publishes his work in a little-known journal, he is neither...

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