Business Horizons, an academic journal published by Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, has seen a big gain in the Thomson Reuters Journal Impact Factor ratings, which measure how often academic journal articles are cited by scholars and researchers.
The Journal Impact Factor ratings are one the most widely used measures of a publication’s impact. They provide quantitative data that readers, editors, and publishers can use to discern the effect that a journal has, compared to similar publications.
The new Impact Factor rating for Business Horizons was 2.588, up from 1.088 two years ago and 0.809 in 2011, when they were established. They are calculated by dividing the number of scholarly items counted in the denominator by all of the citations that a journal has accumulated in the numerator.
“Over the past six years, the journal’s impact factors have experienced a remarkable growth trajectory,” said Dan Li, Business Horizon’s editor, the L. Leslie Waters Chair in International Business and a professor of international business at Kelley.
Dan Li, Business Horizon’s editor
In an article celebrating the new ratings, Li compared those for Business Horizons with three other major practitioner-oriented or balanced business journals – Harvard Business Review (4.374), California Management Review (3.302) and MIT Sloan Management Review (2.569).
She pointed to newly released CiteScore rating by Elsevier, which uses a broader coverage of journals and a longer citation window than JIF. It scores the four journals’ impact metrics as follows: Business Horizons, 2.19; California Management Review, 2.96; Harvard Business Review, 1.30; and MIT Sloan Management Review, 1.77.
“The incredible achievement of Business Horizons is built upon countless hours of hard work by our authors, editors, editorial board, reviewers and editorial and publication staff members,” said Li, who also serves as associate editor of Global Strategy Journal. “Our authors are our most important asset. They entrust us with their valuable intellectual creations, enabling us to share their innovative ideas and solutions with the public.”
The bimonthly Business Horizons is published by the Kelley School in partnership with Elsevier. It began publication as a quarterly in 1956. Through special issues — such as those on crowdsourcing, cybersecurity, social media and crisis management – it has found new audiences.
One article in a special issue about social media has been cited and downloaded thousands of times in six years – “an achievement few traditional pure academic journals come close to matching,” Li said.
The staff also produces videos to accompany articles, taking the research beyond the printed page or text on a screen. The current issue includes articles from scholars at Babson College, Ivey Business School, George Washington University and Vienna University of Economics and Business.
Business Horizons is available to readers through university and school libraries with subscriptions to it and other academic journals. Individuals also can obtain individual articles or subscribe by going to ScienceDirect.com.