The APSA journal list: popularity, purpose and performance

ABSTRACT

For over a decade, the Australian Political Studies Association (APSA) has maintained a list ranking journals into A*, A, B and C bands. However, we know little about how Politics scholars use and view the list. In this study, we firstly discuss the history of the APSA list, before then presenting the results of an original survey conducted in March 2017 with over 250 members of the discipline. While the APSA list seems to enjoy overall support, we find that there are concerns about its purpose, its assessment of journal quality and how it treats different subfields and methodologies. In the discussion section, we address some of the main criticisms that have been made of the list and offer a number of suggestions for revisions. These include widening the consultation process, making submissions to the ranking committee public and extending the range of journals included in the list.

在过去十多年里，澳大利亚政治学研究会一直对杂志进行排行，将其分为A*、A、B、C四档。不过人们很少知道政治学者如何使用和看待这个排行。本文首先讨论了澳大利亚政治学研究会推出这个排行的历史，然后介绍了2017年对五十位学科中人的调查。尽管该排行得到普遍的支持，但也有人对其目的、刊物质量的评估、如何对待不同子领域以及方法表示关切。文章在讨论部分涉及了对排行的主要批评，并提出了若干修改意见，包括扩大咨询过程，公布向排行委员会提交的材料，扩展刊物的范围等等。

KEYWORDS:

• Australian Political Studies Association
• journal rankings
• politics
• research assessment

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the editors of the Australian Journal of Political Science as well as the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the article. In addition, we wish to thank Jacob Deem, Malin Karlsson, Glenn Kefford, Ferran Martinez i Coma, Pandanus Petter and Ariadne Vromen for their assistance and feedback at various points during this research project. Finally, we acknowledge the generous financial support of the Centre for Governance and Public Policy as well as the Griffith Asia Institute.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Duncan McDonnell is Professor of Politics and Deputy Director of the Centre for Governance and Public Policy at Griffith University. He was previously a Jean Monnet and a Marie Curie Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He has written extensively on populism and political parties. His next book, with Annika Werner, International Populism: The Radical Right in the European Parliament, will be published by Hurst and Oxford University Press in late 2019.

Lee Morgenbesser is a senior lecturer with the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University and a recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award. His most recent book is Behind the Façade: Elections under Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia (New York: SUNY Press, 2016) and he is currently finishing a new book entitled The Quality of Authoritarian Rule in Southeast Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

ORCID

Duncan McDonnell http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0319-3747

Lee Morgenbesser http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3062-1284

Notes

1. In Italy, journal lists for all disciplines have been created and maintained by the National Agency for Evaluation of the University System and Research. In Norway, a register for journals is jointly maintained by the National Board of Scholarly Publishing and the Norwegian Centre for Research Data, on behalf of the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. In Australia, the list was introduced by the government, but has been maintained by the national political science association.

2. In their expert surveys of political scientists about journal quality, McLean et al (2009) reported response rates of 32.3% in Canada and 32.5% in the United States. A member’s survey by the UK Political Studies Association a response rate of 11% (see O’Brien and Jennings 2015).

3. We thank the members of the former and current editorial teams of the Australian Journal of Political Science, including Ian McAllister, David Hundt and Annika Werner, for providing us with this submission data. Some of our figures may be slightly lower than the reality due to the transition from submissions by email to those using the online system during this period (David Hundt estimated that approximately 10% of submissions to the AJPS were made outside the system). However, this does not change our conclusion that there has been no major decline in submissions. We also thank Catherine Althaus, Heidi Allen and Rebecca Ciezarek from the Australian Journal of Public Administration editorial team and Wiley.