The Past Speaks

In many disciplines, rankings of journals are common. A medical researcher who publishes in the New England Journal of Medicine will get more credit from his colleagues than one who publishes in a relatively obscure journal. For academics in systems in which there are recurring research audits, journal rankings are very important. As a blogger on the History Workshop Journal blog recently pointed out: British academic historians are now painfully familiar with the imperative to research our own impact. Our funding is to be dependent, in part, on the measurable impact of our researches…

Scientific and social scientific journals have long been ranked, as have some of the journals in which historians publish (for the rankings of economic history journals, see here). A variety of metrics for assessing journal quality have been developed. The relative merits of these competing metrics are debated. The most important of these measures is the Impact Factor, which measures how many other scholars have cited a given publication in their publications.

In 2007,  European Science Foundation began the process of ranking journals in history and other humanities. When the European Reference Index for the Humanities was first published in 2007, it was condemned by many historians as unreliable. For one thing, its ranking were so counter-intuitive as to be incredible. Some historians in the United States, where the more laissez-faire political culture does not permit government research audits, were opposed to the very idea of ranking journals. The main funding body for humanities research in the UK declared: The AHRC strongly advises against the use of the ERIH outcomes as the basis for the assessment of individual candidates for employment or funding.

The 2011 ERIH rankings of humanities journals has now been published.  I have posted the history journal rankings below. It remains to be seen how they are received by historians.

ERIH website cautions that these rankings are for “information” only, whatever that means. Sounds like ass-covering legalese to me.

I suppose the main use of this ranking table is simply as a directory of history journals.

Here is a guide to the abbreviations used below.