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. In this paper, we assess the quality and impact of International Business (IB) journals in relation to each other and management and business journals more broadly. In so doing, we overcome methodological limitations of previous journal rankings by adopting a novel approach that incorporates 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 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.