Measuring the quality of publications: new methodology and case study

In practice, it is important to evaluate the quality of research, in order to make decisions on tenure, funding, and so on. This article develops a methodology using citations to measure the quality of journals, proceedings, and book publishers. (Citations are also used by the Science and Social Science Citation Indexes, published by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), but these Indexes do not cover proceedings, books, and certain journals.) The novel methodology uses statistical sampling, bootstrapping, and classification. This methodology is applied to the field of Information Systems. In this case-study, class-1 turns out to consist of three journals - MIS Quarterly, Management Science, and Communications of the ACM - and two proceedings - VLDB and SIGMOD. The class-1 publishers are Springer, Wiley, and Addison-Wesley. Moreover, hundreds of other journals etc, are classified into a small number of classes. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.