A method for identifying journals in a discipline: An application to information systems

It is a perennial interest of the information systems community to identify a set of information systems journals. The primary approaches to achieving this identification are surveys of academics, article-level citation, and senior scholar consensus. An example of the last approach is the basket of eight journals identified by senior scholars of the Association for Information Systems (AIS). A different and efficient approach is afforded by the publication of data from Journal Citation Reports (JCR). This provides aggregate citation data across individual journals. While the findings provide general empirical support for the choice of the AIS basket of eight journals, they also indicate that five additional journals qualify as core information systems journals. Each of these journals has numerous citations of journals within this set and low citations of individual journals outside this set. Furthermore, a network centrality analysis of this set of journals reveals a high correlation between in-degree centrality and the perceived importance of journals. Overall, the study demonstrates the suitability of this method for identifying core journals in a discipline.