BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Business Horizons, an academic journal published by Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, continues to grow in influence, as evidenced by a recent huge leap in the Impact Factor ratings and rankings, which measure how often academic journal articles are cited by scholars and researchers.
The Journal Impact Factor ratings, part of the Journal Citation Reports published by the global analytics company Clarivate, are one of 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 10.562 in 2021, which means it now ranks 20th out of more than 150 business journals. Just a year earlier, the journal received a 6.361 rating and a ranking of 43rd. Five years ago, its rating was 2.588.
The bimonthly Business Horizons is published by the Kelley School in partnership with Elsevier. It began publication as a quarterly in 1956. It is edited by Greg Fisher, the Larry and Barbara Sharpf Professor and an associate professor of entrepreneurship, with support from Managing Editor Lisa Miller and editorial specialists Sarah Goddard-Martin and Phillip Scuderi.
Greg Fisher
“This jump in impact is a validation of our thesis that there is demand for a peer-reviewed business publication with a strong practical orientation,” Fisher said. “The academic journals in the field of business have become very academic and theoretical, and in so doing, they often overlook the practical aspects of business. Business Horizons does the opposite. We lead with practical insights and perspectives, but we require that these practical insights are generated from a scholarly foundation. This allows us to publish articles that bridge academia and business.”
The Impact Factor ratings are calculated by dividing the number of scholarly items counted in the denominator by all the citations that a journal has accumulated in the numerator. In 2021, Business Horizons articles were cited 8,458 times, up by more than a thousand from 2020, when articles were cited 7,443 times.
“Impact Factors don’t just increase on their own. This is the result of concerted effort on the part of many of the journal’s stakeholders,” said Fisher, adding that the improvement in impact was initiated by previous editors-in-chief, whose necessary changes and advancements included adding blind peer review and establishing a team of associate editors.
Clarivate also produces its Journal Citation Indicator, a measure of the average category normalized citation impact of articles & reviews published by a journal over a recent three-year period. It is used to evaluate journals based on other metrics besides the Journal Impact Factor. Business Horizons rose from 1.60 in 2020 to 1.82 in 2021, which also means it went from being ranked 40th to 30th in this measure.
Business Horizons also rose in another measure of research impact, CiteScore rating by Elsevier, which uses a broader coverage of journals and a longer citation window than the Impact Factor ratings – four years. It counts the citations received between 2018 and 2021 to articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters and data papers published, and divides this by the number of publications published during that same period.
With a CiteScore of 14.0, Business Horizons was ranked fifth in 2021, up from 11.3 and ninth the year before. And this upward trend is expected to continue, according to the CiteScore Tracker for 2022.
Fisher noted the “committed efforts” of associate editors, reviewers, and the journal’s internal editorial team, adding, “None of this would happen without our authors, who entrust their manuscripts to us. It is wonderful to see how these different stakeholders all work in harmony with one another to generate and share impactful business insights in Business Horizons.”
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.