Creating Individual Journal Rankings Based on a Community Approach

Selecting appropriate publication outlets is crucial to any researcher. Journal rankings can be used to guide the selection, but their usefulness may be limited for particular audiences. In this paper, it is argued that especially young researchers and researchers in interdisciplinary fields can benefit from targeting research efforts to a specific community. This can be facilitated by an individually built journal ranking that exploits a community building perspective and by a more transparent process of use. The approach introduced here is based on an analysis of both traditional journal rankings and behavior of academic communities. As a result, we present a procedure for building and using an individual journal ranking, its tentative composition and the ranking calculation. In addition, we suggest measures for evaluating the ranking use. The results presented in this paper are focused on but not limited to young researchers and emerging disciplines.