Evaluating OR/MS journals via PageRank

Scholars, practitioners, and students in operations research and management science (OR/MS) often hesitate to use traditional approaches to evaluate journal quality because of the inconsistency of these approaches to perceptions and other associated biases. We introduce an alternative approach, which is based on Google's PageRank, to evaluate 31 OR/MS journals. This approach enhances the impact factor method by considering both citation quantity and quality. When we apply our method to OR/MS journals, the results match survey opinions and significantly outperform rankings based on impact factors. In addition, we provide an extensive discussion of other methods that have been used to assess journal quality. Compared to these methods, our method is better able to discern quality differences for journals that are perceived to be of relatively higher quality. Most importantly, we integrate our method into a Web-based journal-ranking system. © 2011 INFORMS.