Making sense of entrepreneurship journals

Abstract

PurposeDozens of peer‐reviewed, English language journals are currently published in our field. How ought we to evaluate them? This paper seeks to answer this question.Design/methodology approachThe paper utilizes both relevant literature and data on entrepreneurship journals. The literature derives from both information science and other research areas that reflect on their journals. The data derives from six citation measures from Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science.FindingsThe paper finds that there are 59 currently published English language, peer reviewed journals in entrepreneurship. Contestable judgments based on their impact measures suggest that one of these 59 could be considered as “A+”, four as “A”, five as “AB”, eight as “B”, four as “BC”, 23 as “C”, thirteen as “barely detectable”, and one as “insufficient data but promising”.Research limitations/implicationsJournal rankings affect the resources and prestige accorded to business schools, disciplines and subdisciplines, and individual scholars. However, the need to fit evaluations to school strategy implies that no rating system, ours included, is definitive. Multiple measures are needed, letter grades are misleading, and journal rankings should match the institution's strategy and priorities in stakeholder service. A wider purpose of this study is to alert readers to the range of current methodologies and the limits of conventional rankings.Originality/valueThe conclusions presented in this paper appear innocuous, but standard practice is to use restrictive measures, to employ letter grades, and to prioritize only one stakeholder: scholars. These practices are poorly suited to the entrepreneurship field.