Revisiting the standing of international business journals in the competitive landscape

Journal rankings are contentious, proliferating and bring about a significant change to research productivity and quality assessment. This paper sets out to overcome methodological limitations of previous journal rankings and adopts a novel approach to progress towards a worldwide meta-ranking. Its key advantage is the ability to look at the standing of journals both within and between subject-areas. Comparisons between subject-areas are important because centralization of resource allocation decisions within institutions has ramifications for disciplines and staff involved. Results indicate that within the International Business (IB) domain, JIBS continues to top the list, JWB has solidified its position and joined the upper tier of IB journals, the space below JIBS and JWB is increasingly contested, pointing to the emergence of a multi-tier set of “core” IB journals. In the wider competitive landscape of management and business journals, IB journals perform well in the upper tier, but there is a long tail of IB journals at the lower end of our meta-ranking.