New (ranking) site for philosophy journals

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

I stumbled across this new site on philosophy journals, which includes an new ranking: https://www.pjip.org/

Does anyone know about it, or have thoughts? Seems like it has the potential to turn into a good resource for philosophers, particularly early career folks.

While I'm not a big fan of rankings in general, this site is interesting insofar as it compiles its ranking utilizing a variety of different measures. In this regard alone, it's a helpful central resource to go to in order to view how particular journals fare on different measures (which may be helpful in tenure files, etc.).

One prima facie worry, I guess, is that the different measures used to calculate the overall ranking measure different and potentially incommensurable things (different measures of reputation, citations, etc.), such that the overall ranking may not be a great measure of any particular thing very well at all (see e.g., the fallacy of composition). This might explain some seemingly-strange results, such as Ethics and Philosophy and Public Affairs ranking well below journals that don't seem to be regarded nearly as highly. Another issue potentially affecting the results is that some journals (such as the two just mentioned) seem to be missing data that other journals have.

Anyway, what do you all think?

Comments

[Michel]

One issue that I see is that generalist and specialist journals are jumbled together, including the journals for different specialties. (That's often an issue with "generalist" rankings, which include the likes of Ethics and PPA.)

I don't think it's true or useful to see Ethics ranked far above JHI; what's useful is for the ethicist or historian to have a sense of what the tiers are in their subfields. Or, rather, since most specialists will internalize their specialty rankings simply by dint of reading so much in those journals, it's useful for an outsider to know. But when they're all jumbled together, it's not very helpful.

[Nick]

PJIP has this disclaimer:

"The are many ways of evaluating philosophy journals. This page details some of the more common metrics...Importantly, the PJIP does not advocate for any particular way of ranking nor does the project assume to have any particular authority on the matter."

So, the default rankings on the site are based on every available metric. But if you think rankings should exclude some metrics (e.g., "CiteScore"), then you can do so and get rankings that reflect those exclusions.

I still think the Leiter rankings are the most reliable in terms of having a pulse on how many philosophers view journal rankings, which is most important for those using the rankings to ensure they're publishing in prestigious enough venues to secure career-advancements. But this is a nice alternative if you think other metrics should be doing the work.

[Moral and political philosopher]

Didn't know about this. It might be useful for comparing journals within an area, but not across different areas. The top 5 in e.g. moral and political philosophy is not unreasonable:

Journal of political philosophy
Ethics
PPA
Political theory
European journal of political theory

[Andrew Richmond]

Where are you seeing the overall ranking, with the different measures combined? I must be missing something — all I can find are rankings by each measure, separately.

[Sam Andrews]

Hi all, I run the PJIP journal site and just wanted to briefly clarify a few things.

Mainly that the index doesn't offer a 'new' or 'overall ranking' for journals. The index is just a collection of various rankings - when you load the page it is ordered by SJR by default. Due to the way it is set up, I had to pick one metric to order journals by, instead of say ordering alphabetically until a metric is selected by the user. I'll make some changes to the table so that it is easier to see which column is determining the ranking being presented.

There's another resource on the site that would probably be more useful for early career researchers: the PJIP Directory. It contains information about the area of publication, word counts, open access status, blind review policy, and types of papers published (book reviews; discussions) - see https://www.pjip.org/journal-directory.html

Also, the project isn't that new - an earlier version was posted on this site last year! (https://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2023/06/philosophy-journal-insight-project.html) I intended to reach out again after running the Operations Survey (https://www.pjip.org/surveys.html) as that will fill in a lot of the blank spaces in the directory.

I'm happy to clarify any other ambiguities about the site/project!

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi Sam, thanks for clarifying! I'm a bit overwhelmed with things right now (including an infant at home), so I've been missing a few things here and there. I also have a terrible episodic memory, so it completely slipped my mind that we'd featured this before! ;)

[Sam Andrews]

Also, for Michel & Moral and political philosopher,
You can filter the table to show journals that only publish in a particular area of philosophy. See the area 'Filters' options at the top of the table. Selecting GRNL will only show generalist journals, M&P will only show moral and political, etc. (there is a key below for all abbreviations).

For Nick,
The Leiter rankings are included for generalist journals, - it's the column titled 'Leit'.

Hope that helps!
(and no worries Marcus, happy to clarify!)

[sisyphus]

OP here. Sorry, in rereading my original post I see that I gave the impression that PJIP gave a new ranking. Didn't intend to do that - should have reread what I wrote more closely before posting!(Also would have caught the grammatical error. I can sympathize with Marcus as I've got a toddler who divides my attention when doing this sort of stuff!) I merely meant to say that it gives a new side-by-side comparison of rankings. Sorry for any confusion!

And Sam, I've already benefited from all the aggregating work you've done when I was recently trying to find a venue that will accept certain word counts. Thanks!