Marketing Journal Rankings: Active Scholar Assessment

Abstract

Abstract Journal rankings convey important information to researchers and influence processes related to promotion, remuneration, research funding, and resource allocation in academe. The present research uses direct responses from an international sample of 203 active marketing scholars in a web-based survey to endogenously rank 138 marketing journals by quality, awareness, and importance. We employ regression estimation with nested random journal-within-tier effects to comprehensively rank the marketing journals into four ordered tiers (A–D), and then in turn, subdivide journals in each tier, into “upper,” “middle,” and “lower” groups (e.g. Tier A: A+, A and A−). Our methodology, Active Scholar Assessment (ASA), produces an independent ranking of marketing journals that aggregates individual expert opinion regarding journals by researchers from 68 countries. Subsequently, we compare our ASA-developed marketing journal rankings and categories with prominent citation-based ranking systems (Scimago, Clarivate Analytics’ Journal Citation Reports, Association of Business Schools, and the Australian Business Deans Council) to demonstrate that the opinions of active scholars are comparatively more stable and capture additional information (that is not reflected by computations based solely on citations), and provide useful strategic information and direction to scholars.