Most scientists want to measure, but almost all of them want to be publicly recognized. As a result, an extensive system has been developed to value the scientific output of faculty members.
The discussion on the quality of scientific output and if so, how to measure it, has resulted in numerous - sometimes/often - painful debates about what is good and what is not so good.
In a way this is a ridiculous discussion, because everybody knows the top journals in their field (e.g. AER, QJE in economics; AMJ, SMJ, in management; ASR, AJS in sociology). There are however two major problems. The first is related to judging the quality of the journals that do not belong to the absolute top of the field, but may still be seen as important scholarly achievements. Secondly, the importance of a large number of journals is reflected in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) scores based on the number of citations a journal on average receives. There are however a number of biases between disciplines increasing the complexity of evaluating papers that appeared in journals that are not on the short list of a department.
Several journal quality lists are currently used in the Netherlands.
University of Groningen, Faculty of Economics and Business (
SOM research school)
Maastricht University, Faculty of Economics (METEOR list, not publicly available)
Tilburg University (
CentER list)
Rotterdam School of Management (see ERIM series on
ERIM)
University of Amsterdam & Free University (Tinbergen journal
list)
The most comprehensive attempt to classify journals in social sciences is Professor Harzing's initiative. It ranks almost all journals (including the ones that are not included in the SSCI) on different rankings used in different universities in the world. As such her efforts provide a very good tool to judge someone's output in a relatively objective way.