It is understandable that publishers are concerned that their journals are selected by ISI for inclusion in its database. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that the survival of a particular journal depends on ISI’s decision to cover it in Current Contents. A journal’s ultimate success depends upon its quality, distribution, and many other competitive factors including cost and timeliness. Any one of these factors, including coverage by ISI, can make the difference between success and failure.
A journal’s reputation may not tell the complete story about its impact on the scholarly community. In fact, a study on social science journals suggests quite the opposite. Their research showed that there is a nonlinear relationship between a journal’s reputation and its impact, especially at the extremes of the prestige scale. They conclude that citation data “permit scholars to evaluate the importance of journals based not on opinion but on the frequency of citations” and that “frequency of citation implies scholarly acceptance, or at least acknowledgment of importance through utilization of others’ work.” The researchers go on to mention that “journals have prestige, but their prestige is only derived from the usefulness of the articles they publish.”
