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Dynamics of Journal Impact Factors : Insights for Sustainable Journal Management from the Resource-Based View of Strategy
Type
presentation
Date Issued
2011-03-24
Author(s)
Abstract
For journal editorial boards, the top management team of academic journals, boosting the journals' impact factors are an important objective in today's academic market. The impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal is cited in a given period of time. The dynamics of journal impacts follow nonlinear patterns such as exponential growth, dynamic equilibrium, or decay. These developments are grounded in organizational and social dynamics, inert diffusion, and delayed resource accumulation processes the combination of which complicates the management task. The development of sustainable strategies for the management of journals is this paper's contribution. To achieve this, it captures the system's research architecture and its dynamics in a mathematical model. Thereby, it offers insights about the system's latent structural foundation. Following the resource based view of strategy, the analysis of sustainable strategies concentrates on the resources underlying the journal impact factor, the resources' properties, and their interrelations. The paper tests several policies and suggests a sustainable strategy for achieving a lasting increase in journal impact with fewer short- or long-term sacrifices. One limitation of the paper is that it does not consider dynamic competition between journals. Currently, the model explains the development of the impact factor of a generic journal assuming that its environment does not change significantly. The task for future research is to relax these assumptions by endogenizing context variables
Language
English
Keywords
Journal impact factors
theory-building
system dynamics
simulation
journal management
citations
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
Refereed
No
Event Title
V. European System Dynamics Workshop
Event Location
Frankfurt, Main, Germany
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Eprints ID
91871