Ranking disciplinary journals with the Google Scholar h-index: A new tool for constructing cases for tenure, promotion, and other professional decisions

Given the importance of journal rankings to tenure, promotion, and other professional decisions, this study examines a new method for ranking social work journals. The Google Scholar h-index correlated highly with the current gold standard for measuring journal quality, Thomson Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) impact factors, but provided data for more than 4 times as many disciplinary journals. Eighty disciplinary periodicals are identified and ranked using the Google Scholar h-index. The vast majority of these were ranked higher than the lowest ranked social work journal indexed by Thomson ISI. Although the results hold salience for many professional stakeholders, they may be of particular interest to faculty who publish in disciplinary journals not indexed by Thomson ISI. The Google Scholar h-index provides faculty with an additional tool to document the quality of the venues in which they publish.