Current AAIS Initiatives

Ranking of IS Journals and Conferences - Urgent IS Community Action

On the grounds that refereed conferences are important to Australian academics in CS/IT, particularly with the RQF looming, NICTA has instigated a study into ranking them. The idea is that if we as a community do a responsible job both of ranking initially and then of updating annually, our rankings are more likely to be used for RQF, ARC and internally for promotions than having something imposed on us by the "powers that be".

CORE (Computing Research Education - the committee of Australian computer science professors) has been (self?) designated as the "keeper" of the list, though it will also go to the IS community and software engineering. All conferences reported to DEST from 2000 were sorted by RFCD code and NICTA convened a group of 20 or so academics to rank the conferences before distributing the list for updates, omissions, etc.

The IS community reacted with alarm when the draft listing emerged from NICTA and ACPHIS has commenced its own ranking process

ACPHIS (in collaboration with AAIS) has formed a working group with the aim of producing journal and conference rankings that have the broad support and endorsement of the Australian IS community. The first draft of the journal ranking is reproduced below. The next task is to bring this to the ACPHIS workshop in September for discussion. Among a number of other things in relation to the ranking that will be discussed are issues such as identifying journals that have been missed, journals that are in the wrong tier, and other rankings we might consider.

The draft list of journals and rankings described below are based on a number of reputable rankings:
– ISWorld / AIS ranking based on published papers which had previously ranked journals. The ranking provided is 1 through 53 with no two journals on the same ranking. We have taken the view that anything that is ranked in 1 – 12 is in tier 1 (this is consistent with the other rankings), Tier 2 are those 12 to 20, Tier 3, 20 to 30, 30 – 40 for Tier 4, and 41-53 the rest.
http://www.isworld.org/csaunders/rankings.htm (accessed August 24th 2006)

– Vienna University (for a European perspective) has extensive rankings of all journals in the business field. Rankings were A+, A, B, C.
http://bach.wu-wien.ac.at/bachapp/cgi-bin/fides/fides.aspx?journal=true;lang=DE (accessed August 24th 2006)

– Lousianna State University (United States) ranking provided by Rudy Hirschheim, provides a very North American perspective but with few journals ranked.

– London School of Economics ranking provided by Leslie Wilcocks, provides another non North American perspective, highly regarded IS Department Journals and conferences include only those ranked as ‘first ranked’ of which there are 24 only.

– Thomson Scientific (ISI) impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the "average article" in a journal has been cited. The impact factor of a journal is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source items published in that journal during the previous two years. The impact factor can be used to provide a gross approximation of the prestige of journals in which individuals have been published.
http://scientific.thomson.com/free/essays/journalcitationreports/impactfactor/ (accessed August 24th 2006)
Also considered are rankings from Monash University, ANU and University of Queensland.

Tier 1 and Tier 2 Journals

Other Journals

http: aais.it.uts.edu.au/initiatives.html  last updated 18 sept 2006 by jim@it.uts.edu.au