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Should Journal Rankings Matter? Assigning “Prestige and Quality” in the Neoliberal Academy

Why do we publish and who does this knowledge benefit? Our interest in these questions was reignited with the recent publication by Hodge et al. (2019) who reported findings on their survey of social work faculty who teach in programs that offer a PhD. Respondents were asked to rank order a list of social work journals according to their sense of each journal’s quality and to assess their degree of familiarity with those journals. Using these reports, the authors created two journal rankings: quality and prestige. The latter was derived by multiplying a journal’s composite quality score by its familiarity score. These rankings were offered as an alternative to commonly used impact factor scores which have been long critiqued as limited measures affected by field-dependent dynamics and vulnerable to “journal impact factor engineering” (Reedijk & Moed, 2008). Considering the journal’s unique mission to create a space for feminist scholarship in social work, an aim which continues to be a marginalizing endeavor in the field (Barretti, 2011), we were surprised to see Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work appear in the rankings at all. We were unsurprised, however, that it did not make it to the top tier. As Hodge and colleagues (2019) remind us, “the venues in which scholarship is published can have a significant, determinative effect on decisions regarding tenure, promotion, funding, merit increases, and professional visibility” (p. 1). The hierarchy of ranking has material consequences also for journals, including Affilia. Indeed, Affilia’s perceived value influences the number and types of submissions, who is willing to review those submissions, as well as how many individuals or institutions are willing to pay to access them. Journal rankings do matter, whatever our views of them. But should they? Our aim here is not to evaluate the article by Hodge and colleagues or critique the methods they employed. In this editorial, we consider, instead, the politics of assessing “prestige and quality” in the context of persistent systemic inequities in the neoliberal university and global inequities in academic publishing (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014). What do the terms “quality” and “prestige” mean within the context of the U.S. academic industrial complex, a system where western-centric, positivist, universalist epistemologies continue to dominate knowledge production and dissemination? What forms of epistemic injustices accompany the construction of “quality” and “prestige”? How do we understand such terms within institutions of higher education where lack of diversity among