The Past Speaks

Journal Quality Guide of the Association of Business Schools  is used to rank journal articles and is important in the lives of many management academics in the UK and Scandinavia. The new version of the guide was released at 12:01am yesterday. I know of at least one colleague who stayed up past midnight so that they could download the guide immediately after its publication.

There have been some significant changes in the relative positions of business history journals on page 17 of the ABS guide.

For one thing, some economic-historical journals have appeared on the list of approved historical journals. We can expect more submissions by management scholars to such journals.

Business History a UK based journal, has now been overtaken by the Business History Review from the US. The precise reasons for this change continue to be debated. Business History now ranks as a 3, a rank it shares with Enterprise and Society. The Business History Review has climbed to 4.  The system of rankings has five grades: 4*, 4, 3, 2, and 1.

One other important development in this ranking system is that Management and Organization History has attained a ranking of just 2, whereas prior to yesterday’s release of the new rankings, it had been widely expected to climb to 3.

The guide can’t be downloaded as document that I can forward to you, so I have inserted a screen shot.