The definitive guide to ranking IS journals

I Record my brother nick my man. I haven't talked to you since Last year, I think like it's been a while. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, maybe early January You know when we've done like a good old couple that's been married for a long time We took a break from one another like you didn't send me a text No emails. Well, that's that's a don't for you now that no emails no conversation We just need a little break and you know what like now. I'm happy to see you again Good good. I'm happy to see you - no, you send me an email then you're one of three hundred emails that day and and There's no way it's a horrible way people you have no idea people like if you send an email to Nick Burrenty at the University of Notre Dame It's that's the a business like a black hole if you don't know what a black hole is like just send an email to Nick It just disappears and the energy is just sad it goes away and comes out as some sort of negative energy It's just as if it never existed So so I get hundreds of emails every day and then I'm in meetings all day and I'm still trying to do some things in addition to meet with people So not only my research, but also what so what that means is that I try to kind of triage my emails a bit and then by the Weekend that's what I do Saturday and Sunday. I do hundreds of emails I thought that's when you do reviews Are used to well, you know my friend. I step down from a man's quarterly as an actor so good for like first of all good for you And thank you for your service. You've done this for what like many many years Yeah, and it's good that it comes to an end like my my role is ending this year Can't wait. I'll be very honest. I can't wait. It's just like you can't do this forever You got to step down and let someone else do it So I've been either an associate editor or senior editor for either ISR or MISQ since I think 2012 or 2013 right and I don't know how many papers I've handled and what I've done But here's the other thing. I've got the special issue coming out November right so we're gonna have those to deal with but Yeah in MISQ right remember on ethics Ethics regulation and policy special issue in case people I already start hearing people that are preparing and doing projects Like I know of at least four cool Projects that are gonna be submitted to that. I think they'll get a lot of really cool papers Hey, we don't want to talk about your work situation But let me just say this. This is the third year. I think that you're in this role right like and it's not work second Okay, it's not working dude It's like I know you try and very hard to do all these things and you know do this and do that other stuff But it's it's seriously. It's getting worse Which is well, hey, all I know is you my friend are the opposite. You're on a sabbatical. You're doing nothing No, wow recording a podcast right now. I'm actually I cut down trees today. I you know fixed the roofing I made dinner and whatnot. No. Yeah, I just started. I had my last bit of teaching and whatnot last week like Germany is a different you know clock Of course, but yeah, this is how long is this sabbatical? Long term right? It's like half a year But by the like the next term will start in mid-October. So actually, that's like eight months No like eight months teaching free. So that's pretty good. What will you do during your sabbatical? What's the plan? Well, you know as always there's like a there's a whole bunch of papers in the various stages of revision And I'm slowly but surely sort of finishing them up and I've started building agents. That's what I'm actually doing Like I'm working with codecs and with cursor and I'm playing around a little bit with clod Claude code two most of the time with codecs And I um, you know riding Python code Why haven't written I haven't written for me really that's more apt But yeah, I'm building agents and that's exactly what I wanted to do I wanted to really start building agents and get get pretty deep into into the technical bits of it and really do it for myself Not just what firms do it, which is what we do all the time So yeah, I have like four or five in my head that I want to build and I started building the first and it kind of works So I want to make it a little bit better and then move on to the next and the next and the next and Build a bunch of agents. Can you make an agent to take care of my email for me? Yeah, blah, blah. I mean, yeah, I'd be better for you too Better for everyone do that All right, so I actually have a human assistant who I don't let her do my email because the fact is you know This judgment. It's a lot of people wanting meetings and that sort of thing and I don't want meetings with everyone And then those who I am having meetings with I have to decide is that it's one minute meeting a half hour And I have this new idea that Paul Pavlov gave me. I don't know if I've ever told you about this But 20 minutes is what you schedule a meeting for That way you give yourself 10 minutes to go over and if you're we're going to normally schedule a one hour meeting You do a 40 minute meeting. I like that You you give yourself those little segments of time. So it's actually that's that's I like that idea. Yeah Yeah, I need to tell you a lot about something that still happened while we were at ISIS last December in Nashville Before or after the the the fire alarm went off. Anyway I had a I had a sit down with Two representatives from Elzaville the big publisher and the two people that I met they were actually they approached me because they listened to our podcast And we've had some episodes where we talked about you know publishing and journals and et cetera and so forth And they requested a meeting so I'd sit down with them and they were the basically the two people that are responsible for the ISIS journals in the Elzaville portfolio of journals right they have thousands of journals of course So we sat down and they wanted to get my opinion on What I think is going to happen with journals now that we see AI influx of papers like AI generated papers and AI flooded reviewing et cetera, and then they showed me some statistics on a very high level of abstraction Of what it already is doing to elderview journals They have a they have pretty good analytics on you know, like submission numbers and cycle times and whatnot and also retractions and everything and boy that that influx of AI paper Like what we see in an is is absolutely nothing Yeah, compared to other disciplines like you know natural sciences et cetera They have journals where where the the the amount of submissions in the calendar year has just increased tenfold easily wow and it's all AI submissions Yeah, right. So they're they're having aIs well So so obviously for them the same for us. It's difficult to say which Whether it was completely I written I augmented or whatever, but what they are seeing is Twice three times four times five times ten times as many submissions for any journal And what they're saying probably rightfully so is well, that's just it's breaking the way that journals are being operated Which is usually a bunch of academics A couple of gatekeeper roles like you know editor chief senior editor associated or sometimes you have like roles like a manageral assistant Someone that looks after the the emails and the workflows um and scholar one and stuff like that And that's the pre-screening et cetera and all of that is just breaking down If you have ten times as many submissions and it is um, and I know that robot Davison from ISJs Reporting similar things and I said the I've seen the same thing with European journals Not in that vicinity of that same scale, but it is happening It's happening more so in other journals because two else of here IS is an issue within a niche Yeah, yeah, it really is you can't put it any other way. It's nowhere near any of the important of voluminous You know other disciplines of journals And then we and we don't quite see the same trend. That's what I took away from the stats that they showed me So they got JSIS for example they got INM DSS um, I know I think these are the four main ones, I think Anyway, so they get four out of the you know top 10 or whatever IS journals that they show it and Um, so it's not really happening in our field, but it's happening everywhere else and that got me thinking um In that age I think we need to look at journals and journal rankings and journal operations very very very differently to what we've done in the past mm-hmm Yeah, and it can't be impact factor because you know what the top impact factor is of any IS journal probably i.g. I am Yeah, international journal information management right so and that that's a great case study in itself If you look at what happened to i.g. I am over the let's say last two three four five years I mean if you if you put it very Broadly and abstractly would say like oh it climbed up in reputation people took notice It had an enormous impact factor then there was you can probably say it had a lot of the shit storm Um, and then over the last one or two years it got really quiet Mm-hmm. It got really really quiet. They shuffled around the editorial board And there's a new editor in chief and you know, and so it's a little bit differently But this is one of the cases where the impact where I would think the impact factor is a broken metric And that is the case study that exemplifies this Um, they applied the impact factor game. It's skyrocket So that people took notice and they didn't stop there and it got into into this realm where let's say It looked very fishy. Let's just put it like that um, and and and and then at some stage the intervened and fixed it and and changed Exchange on people from the board But the reputational damage is done like would you submit anything to i.g. I'm no no see right so no neither would I and And I guess know what a lot of people now these days which is a shame If you think about that the of course for all this time they have been people that just submitted Papers good work to these journals believing it's a good journal Um, that's has a high reputation and you know at the same time There was some other sort of gaming whatever type of work that was being submitted and it totally ruins the good work That obviously also exists in this journal and that's the sad part of this story So low story short impact factor as a metric is completely broken So you need to take that off the table like literally if someone says the impact factor is 12 To me that always sounds like that looks like something this fishy So in fact if it's lower Then I think that's a better quality metric than when it's even though if it gets too low right there's like a sweet spot for for management uh and i.s Journals and it's somewhere between I don't know Four and ten three and five something like that yeah Yeah But there again, I mean anything over a certain point do we really care if it's like over five Or if it's a six or a seven or an eight i mean My take on this is I really really really disregard it It's not even a hygiene factor anymore In the sense that it needs to have a certain limit I really think it's just it's been it's been game so much That it's really just doesn't tell me anything is it completely use a signal i think Well, but how about on the low end you we used to have a um when I was at University of Georgia. There was an interim Dean and he was the former president of the university and he was so freaked out when he got there to the to the interim dean That we had a journal list and that you're he's like what is this you know You can't just have a journal list and only publishing those journals. He didn't so he kind of had this idea The you know things that were over one an impact factor of one It's kind of a signal that they're legitimate Right Like ten years ago absolutely Yeah, and that that was the thing right but then as journals started You know take paying attention and people start paying attention then this this metric is just too easy to gain and Journalists have done this some of them have done this ruthlessly some of them have this very mildly But you know it sort of takes it off the table like if you hey make sure that you cite at least five papers from last year in that journal Whether they explicitly demanded or just implicitly do it because it boosts your chances which is probably does Either way You only do this for signaling So the signal is just that someone listen to the signal It doesn't say anything about quality about substantive quality anymore. So And it got me thinking what about the other way real quick Yeah, but what what's your guess and you may know this do you know nature and science do you know their impact factors? Uh, I believe back in the day and I haven't looked up reasons that I think they had something around 30 for a while Yeah, it's 48 and 45 and if you look at the nature journals um Nature energy has an impact factor of 60 Nature materials has 86 Uh, and then nature chemistry is 20 so if you're up over 20 with your crappy little IS journal like i gym You're there with nature chemistry. You're not in something's wrong You should your little IS journals should not be Okay, this is going to be unpopular. I think the issue here is not with IGM It's with the nature Family of journals. By the way the same with the science family of journals They started launching new journals that piggyback of the name of nature and science and most of them are Borderline fishy to be honest really yes. I think so there's a lot of them that are that are Curting the line between being good nishi journals and really being outright unethical like a several of them have Submission and accepted numbers that are nowhere near the quality stance that we would like them to have and I can't put any names on this But I think this is this has been a detriment. So the big publishers they've done and this is a marketing move They've they've taken the the brand name And assigned it to some random journal like nature machine intelligent. Why they have what that be a good journal in Machine intelligence. I'll take a nature machine intelligence paper Well, you do that because it has nature on it, right? Yeah, yeah, I've done some work in nature sustainability. Honestly That's just a random journal. It's not good, you know No, it's not nature has nothing to do with them. It just has the same brand name and science is the same thing There's this science magazine. There's science advances science this science that they're all the same I don't think what the big public. I don't think any of them is really holding up to deep scrutiny I don't think the any of them is top journals. They have a top brand. That's a huge difference in my view. Hmm interesting Yeah, I don't follow the sciences as much as I probably should but yeah So if you go with this so impact factor is out as a criterion My point here has been like some of the big name publishers and all they sort of Off-brand journals that they started they're out for me too Well, that was I told you my story that once when I tried to I decided I'm not going to give my free labor to Yeah, so the big corporations right and not because I'm anti-corporate. I love Free enterprise and I love the you know capitalism and and I think companies should make money Right, but I personally I'm not going to give my free labor to companies That says a reviewer or as an author and I made this decision One day and then one of the PhD students wanted to submit a paper somewhere to a and then I'm like oh I guess it's not about me. It's about the PhD students career and then that through that one out the window But I think the sentiment is pretty good shouldn't we Prioritize non-commercial with our labor like when we send a material When we do reviews when we do editorial work. I've been an editor now for ISR and MSQ That's informs and that's Whatever MSQ is sort of what universe of Minnesota. That's what it is. It's just like it's yeah Yeah, it's not a for-profit organization So it's like that's the but then I do work with information and organization right which is a publisher. Yeah, I mean so I work for European Journal of Information System with which is Wiley or you know nature springer whatever Yeah, one of the big ones But I've also worked for MSQ and JAS and now both of these are not corporate publishers They're basically both community-owned and And based on what I what my conversation with these elder people who just let me to finish that story So they said this is happening the only way for us as a publisher of journals to deal with is We need to algorithmify our journal operations and I was sitting there thinking like I can't even disagree That's the only way forward you can't keep doing this manually. That means they're looking into article pre-screening You know plagiarism checks. That's an old one. You know like but but but algorithmic editorial or review handling of journals If you have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of submissions You cannot do this by having a person decide which reviewer to invite like it doesn't work anymore So I think this is where these people are going All these corporations and the journals that are under these publishing rebels. This is where they're going And I understand why they're doing this and I don't see an easy way out. But what that means for me is It means like gee, I think out because I like the way that we're doing at the moment that we have peers looking at my papers And I have trusted senior people as it editors deciding on the publishability on the work very manual very interpersonal That means I think community journals like Informs ISR MISQ University of Minnesota slash IAIS and Journal of the AIS as truly just our journal These are the most important ones going forward way over and above anything else Anything else like so to me these are Very simply the top three journals in our field and simply put first one MISQ University-owned and AIS and JIS that probably ISR in that order and by the way as you have noticed J MIS For that on the rank because it's already a corporate publisher Okay, so except that it's very personal and all right you there's a lot to unpack here the first is Why did this guy meet with you from elsewhere? What did he want from you? I didn't want anything from me They were listening to the podcast and they thought we had some insights into how the journals run I think he wanted to tell someone who knows several journals. I don't know like he didn't want anything from me You I thought they did but they didn't they just wanted to talk with me and see how would the assess the situation that they see their journals Like the trends and the journal publishing game. Oh, wow All right, and then it's very interesting two interesting things that you did you brought up the one which is you put JIS there But J MIS which is often the third You know IS journal But you put MISQ ahead and you even put MISQ in JIS ahead. So what's your logic? Is that out of like patriotism or for the for the field or is that because you Well, so so first of all In terms of editorial board like that's usually criteria right who's on the board? How do how reputable do we think the people are that are the essays and a's on the board? Now frankly I don't see a lot of difference between any of these three at the top I see a little bit of difference if you compare those to Some of the other journals that I know basket like the European journal JIT whatever they they they they editor board is a little bit different They have some more up and coming kind of people for example, but eyes are MISQ and I will say JIS They should really try to get the best people on the board So editor board this slight difference, but Basically, it's all the same. So it's not really a good criterion to distinguish anything Rev your process. Rev your quality Dude completely indistinguishable Like they're all good. They're all same time frame Like this. No, I will argue MISQ because of a run Because of Andrew in particular those two of what they get and now Sue is I think keeping it going I think they have focused more on speed than ISR in recent years where I think the ISR you know kind of my experiences that the They tend to Have reviewers into more rounds. I think MISQ a rune and Andrew really try to create the thing of only use reviewers for a couple rounds two Maybe three. I think ISR never got that message MISQ really wanted to accelerate the review process So I think it's going to be a little faster whereas ISR. I think so and that would be the main reason why I see MISQ at the top Like it is just a little bit more consistent a little bit better in terms of how they how they handle the process a little bit faster a little bit early going to the editorial runs blah blah blah JS seconds very consistent. You can you know put your money on what kind of feedback you'll get etc And it's still faster than ISR so that's why ISR is sort of a little bit further down All right, well wait, I'll give you a counter item. This is yeah, but this is really this is these are all just minute details I think so I'll give you a couple counter arguments the first is ISR is informs Informs outside of the IS field has a lot of status right? It's got the Operations journals, you know management science. It's got org science, right? It's it's Because of the informs name if you go outside of IS ISR is a legitimate top tier publication and where they might not even in some schools that might not even recognize MISQ so But I don't want to take any of these arguments. Yeah, this is the status argument That it wait like there's no evidence for any of these just for beside each other all the time Is it huh? Well, I don't know. I think here in the US. I mean, I think in the world This is my experience and again, it's just anecdotal the entire world thinks of MISQ's are top tier journal and ISR is basically similar in MISQ But MISQ's really the thing in the United States in business schools I think it's a little bit flipped where everybody appreciates MISQ But ISR is the serious elite, you know, it's informs. It's in the big leagues. If you really want to do I top tier IS paper. It's an ISR so I agree most places like here at Notre Dame. We're not going to distinguish between the two I mean, they're both elite journal publications, but But there are schools that won't recognize MISQ in the States Well, you know, and you probably find different schools outside. Do you know what it means to me as an author? To me, it's really depends on the type of paper Like if it's very strong on the like for example um, I think there's a difference in the level of theoretical contributions Am I in the type MISQ over ISR? So if it's a little bit more empirical a little bit more methodologically super duper duper That means that ISR is probably a way to go And if it's more interesting novel a little bit more out there theory stuff than MISQ so but this is a dependent on the type of paper Nothing else right and depending on who the editor is because yeah, I would say more technical papers can go to ISR Except for the technical papers that are in MISQ and then I would say more theory papers can go to MISQ except for There's some wonderful theory papers in ISR including my first No, I guess it would have been my second top tier was ISR But from someone that actually submits a lot more to JIS for example than you do. I'm pretty sure of that right Um that It's the same thing. I mean they they they with the one nice difference is that they don't have this AE level So the package is a slimmer like the the leaner anyway, so these are that my top three and we can be paid about one With it I'll go with it, but I'm not gonna put JIS in front of ISR, right? So my argument for for JIS over informs is that is that it doesn't need this Informed is an important association and a lot of people outside of us think it's a big deal thing Um, and what I so maybe maybe not like because I never hear that argument only from you So JIS the interesting thing to me is this is the general of the AIS and the AIS is just it's just us It's no one else. There's not an external state all the informs IS is a division within informed So if informs decides on something it ripples down to a to ISR you know like the other So and JIS doesn't like it's just like when when we don't want to do something in the journal We as a community have to fund it we pick amongst ourselves the editing chief based on the criteria We decide on ourselves with a committee that's composed of ourselves And then we we have the people do the things they want to do like it's just all of that is us And if we want to do something about it, you know, if we want to keep the review process manually Then we do this if you want to algorithmic etc. If you want to change the nature of the contribution on theoretical to whatever We just do that So I think that that means a lot and I think it will mean a lot more going forward Yeah, I think what you're saying is great about JIS and it's one of the reasons it went from being a good journal to being an outstanding journal The problem is in reality our field's flagship journal is msq If you now it might be run out of Minnesota, but we really do I mean all the things you say Also work for msq There's some Minnesota people they're on a board, I suppose, but no, they're part of the IS field and it's very much an IS So can we can we can we have two flagship journals? We really have one real one, but we keep cheering for the other one, right? Yeah, look I think we have a like a tiered like personal I think I asked the size that we have we've grown to 5,000 people but let's face it We haven't actually grown beyond that. It's not that we're on our way to 10,000 members So we've been pretty stable around 5,000 global members Personally, I think one one true flagship that's that's enough You got to have a way of Sifting out the really super duper top stuff from the also very good Other stuff we don't need 10 journals. We don't need four equal top journal I think if we have a couple of really top journals And but within them there's one that's a little bit better than the other. I think that's fine You know, so record if we're doing records ranking I'm going to give you It sounds like we're basically saying misq is number one in records ranking I'm not going to let you put JAS in front of ISR. You have to go ISR number two JAS number three No, here's my is my proposal. We build a pyramid scheme. It's the pyramid scheme of journals At the top there's only one journal. This is misq then the second tier has two journals And this is I was I was I when the third tier has three journals and the third tier has three journals Now now this is I think where it gets really interesting because everything else is a little bit like personal liking and preference and whatnot But what's the third tier? Do you want to hear my proposal? Third tier. Yeah, yeah, sure I think it's j my s. I think it's ice j And the third one I'm a little bit unsure, but I reckon I'd go European journal And I'm saying why when you're putting three I don't see a difference between European journal JIT and ISJ Those are the now they might have been in my pyrozerma steam only I only have three slots on the third tier That's it. So you can't do you can't create an artificial thing like so I would do this You can't get away with I like your pyramid idea I think it's fun if you're gonna do a ranking you have to number rank them You can't be a little pansy and and and equivocate, right? You have to go order I think it's clear. It's going to be msq ISR J I s j m is that's records ranking your top four I recognize j's is right there So now well then you have to make that argument, but but um Well, let me give you a couple of ideas real quick before we go into the usually the old basket I guess we could call it because the new basket as I predicted It created this basket of 11 and it killed the entire basket and totally killed the list right We've had it for one over a year now and nobody name one person that goes by oh I'm picking everything in the 11 and that's my decision criteria for anything. It doesn't exist It's just dead. It's not what we're doing. Yeah, which is exactly what you've said is now within that list of 11 we debating tiers That's what we're doing. I don't even know what they are. I don't know what the 11 are. I knew what the eight were So yeah, I think we killed it all right now Here's the issue that we run into next of course. You're going to go J my s i s j j i t egis right these are like the next group And it's the old basket you're essentially recreating which makes your list really really freaking boring record I wouldn't put all of them in there to be honest. I would know let me do this because there's an element of advocacy to your ranking What if we were to pick after those four Which we kind of agree are like our top. What if you had to pick what's the next one that is not owned by a big publisher Oh crap. I'll give you a proposal for you Yeah, go for it ACM transactions of a bias now here's my argument there It's ACM yeah, which is the computing society We are kind of a relative of that we have our own journal transactions of MIS the same argument is kind of informed Informs has universal appeal ACM has universal appeal. IEEE has universal appeal as far as I know we have two ACM journals We have ACM transactions of MIS we have ACM Sigma database the database one right those are two ACM's aren't they and then IEEE we have sort of Yeah, it's not really us that's not a protection engineering management Which is not really I see there, but there are IS people. So it's like let's take IEEE off of there And when you talk about straight IS the two that we have are the ACM ones, right? I like that. What do you think? What do you know? I don't have a lot of experience with them But I like the the way that you construct that argument to be honest. It's a good argument there Like what would if we and records list what if we and records Ranking put ACM to MIS is number five. Do you have any experience with them? I mean like review like I'm my assumption And that's another my assumption is the editorial book quality review process review quality review timeliness It's it's pretty similar across many journals like some of the little bit faster more consistent some a little bit slower But by and large they all okay aren't they not I mean that's not really a criterion to distinguish anymore Yeah, so I'll give you two where I came up with that. First of all, that's not my original It's something that I'm Rick Toanna basically mentioned to me one way back when he's like you know what we don't pay attention ACM to MIS But like computer science. It's an ACM journal. Whatever they you immediately have legitimacy outside of the business school, right? The other thing which full disclosure hung Jew my colleague my new colleague here at Notre Dame is the editor-in-chief of ACM to MIS, right? So that's why it's on the kind of top of mind for me But I was looking at that and those are the two things that I thought it's like why aren't we But if it's an ACM journal. It's MIS Why the heck if we love you know getting behind JIS Why don't we love getting behind this one too? So I don't know that was just some what about if by that reasoning What about CIS that's just like from deep within the core of our communities just us It has to people still regarded as a second-class citizen and they said oh only shitty work. It's published at whatever But it's not even true and and it does all the other things that that that know how the journal does like the panels the debates in the workshops and the Tutorials, you know you what some builders career out of You know CIS tutorials. It is by far the most red of any of the ice journals Like the universe statistics always like millions of people read CIS not the other. I agree except that it's communications, right? So it's like not really Research what does a lot of other things too. Oh well. Yeah, and so we've had we there's always been this debate should it not do that because one of the things this does like You know publishing teaching papers and stuff like this. This is you know, this is detrimental to your impact factor It really is like because why would you side a teaching case? No one's either teaching case, but everyone uses it Right, that's the only reason I wouldn't put CIS up there. It has some nice research articles. It's really well cited But the issue is that it's a communications right in many ways. It's kind of a magazine or it's it has a lot of roles other than publishing research papers In addition to publishing research papers, but it's really it's a really big community journal and it's always I always bucked me that people Don't give it the respected deserves. Let's put it this way. I understand why in the research ranking metric games It doesn't look good enough to be you know to be there But that that's because we needed to be exactly the way it is All right, so ACM TMS. I was looking at the editorial board and it is a star study editorial board The problem is everybody's pictures are from like 20 years ago We got Ahmed Abasi Matthias Yarki is still on there. I believe he passed away Helmet Krichmeier, Michael Chao, Bolognes on their Nachi Sahu. So this is a great editorial board and then Yeah, the advisory board has Okay, yeah, so so I think the ACM TMS if we wanted to pick one to get behind That might be one that would be interesting Anyway, what if we say there's only five four four or five ice journals Say five let's go with that. So you have the three that we had JMS are probably still put up there. What's the fifth one? Well, that's just it when you mentioned ice J ice JJIT and Aegis I don't know I think they have a slightly different flavor like ice J is going to be more qualitative only Not only but primarily qualitative. I think JIT and Aegis more of a mix There's the Steffan's Idol theory of JIT that people outside of our field Don't know is they know it so they'll look at JIT as a top tier So yeah, to me those three I kind of think of them as the The basket journals that are just very good journals and not Am I skew ice are kind of thing I think they're definitely a second tier They're good journals they're good papers in there, but that it's just a different level like it's just On all sorts of things in terms of interestingly as in terms of rigor in terms of theory, right? So I decide among those three though I go by which of the review pros do I think is handled the best and I think there Ice J is hadn't showed us above European journal, which is better than JIT. Sorry. So this is my experience as an author JIT is just inconsistent very slow European journal is inconsistent not necessarily slow and JIT, sorry ice J is just It runs like JIT is really well run. It's just like you get it and you can bet your money that within 10 to 12 weeks like in three months you'll have your feedback So before we publish your ranking We have to do two things one is assess the editorial boards see which editorial boards we think are stronger And then the other is we have to maybe ask the editors for that information. How fast do you turn things around in average? All that information is available We just had that the senior scholar general review quality serving that they do every every X years. It just came out in December. I looked at this Honestly, they're all about the same. They really are. It's like that's what I mean like the review process quality It's it's a minor detail like in the sense that my skew does it most consistently in some of the other ones struggle a little bit with consistency in the rounds Review quality like the quality of the feedback I would say as an editor behind the scenes one of the advantages of my skew and these journals is that you get like that If you ask a really senior person to do a review they'll do it and if I ask a European journal they say I'm sorry I'm an editor for something else. I'm not doing it. That's a big issue right most of the people I had itters Records journal ranking number one of my skew two ISR three JAS four JMIS five six seven tie Aegis JIT ISJ. No, I'm sorry. I'm just picking ISJ. I'm not picking the other two You can't you can't do that. I'm not knitting. All right. We're gonna have to go back on that and then eight Let's throw ACM two MIS in there Although I love I know And I think that's another one that outside of our field gets more eyeball it's not broad It's not big-tendy enough for me to be honest. I like it's great for quality papers wins a lot of awards blah But try publishing a survey there Whatever you just put ISJ there ISJ is not a no IJ is not just quote. No, it's completely big 10 It used to be when you and I started it was the qualitative journal. It's no long. I've published a goddamn cross-sectional survey in there once All right, so who do you put at number eight? Are we putting ACM TMIS? Are we putting I know are we putting Who would you put it after I would normally put in M but I don't because it's elder viewer in publishing blah So I'm not putting that by that same reasoning. I'm not putting I know there I like your idea of ACM TMIS because the only alternative that I have Is CIS or sickness database now sickness database is kind of like a big tent with a little bit of a theory flavor And they got this weird philosophy corner. I kind of like that and I like it because it's different I like CS because I think it's under appreciated and underrated under rated And ACM TMI I just don't know enough about it. It's what for what I can see. It's it's good There's good quality papers in there and when I see one of them I would you know like I would cite the paper when I like it and I'll put that citation I wouldn't think twice about it So I think that's a little signal that I would use for myself. So it's like yeah, I'll look side in TMI S paper. Why not? So maybe maybe yeah, we can go with that But all the other ones DSS like Now how about the two that you're missing you're a German. You should have brought a visa by now and the second one is strategic journal of information system quite interesting. What JSIS is the big 10 document like it's fine I think the strategy paper is fine and you can cite it all of that But it just doesn't publish all I as research. It's simple, right? So like if it's not strategic you are at a disadvantage. So I think that then You need to have some criteria by which you can distinguish and that's a criteria that makes it a topic journal more so than any of the other ones Uh, the same reason goes a little bit for European journal not strictly but a little bit It publishes his focus on European tradition European region European cases European whatever Not strictly you can't submit other things this well, but it has that tendency A visa is a very German frankly speaking um, the review quality is is is okay But it's a little bit too nice you can put you can get stuff published there that you just can't publish in other journal Like I'll be honest. It doesn't have the reputation. No so no one outside of Germany Sees it reads it sites it It really isn't like it's it's very good for German journal. It's a lot better than what it used to be It's good trajectory. Everything is fine But you know if we go by putting any national journal up there then we you know, it's just not there. So Where are we then in that so you brought up INM I know you're kind of lumping those two together You brought up So we're bringing visa down the list a bit What else what journals are we missing? We're we're elevating My point is we need fewer journals. We're not that many Like it's marketing with 15,000 people can get away with three top journals. Why do we have 11 or 10 or 8? I don't think we need that many like publish your work in finder And you know more than you like I publish in only 11 of these I Exit for eyes out, but I publish in 10 of the 11 right so I'm like all the time to this day I'm picking the journals and submitting there. I'm not always going in my skew eyes on and then see where else I can put it So I so bio means go ahead and do that and you'll be fine But if you ask me like if if for whatever reason that is important for what is a great journal or how do we distinguish what the best of the best kind of things I think we should stick with two three. I mean even squirming about having four of them like one or two Three maybe it's fine. So for think think FD 50 where we have three journals at the moment Really do we really SIS with all the other business should be the we'd be the only ones that have four jones and FD 50 I think that's kind of no marketing has that many and others have that many so I Well, they're way bigger than us Entrepreneurship or it's entrepreneurship bigger than us. No, entrepreneurship is to a ETP and JBV. That's it Really? Okay. I mean plus plus we can publish it Walk and AOM journals and all these sorts of things. These are also available to us. I don't think we need that many IS top journals anymore All right, record This is what we're going to do you and I are going to come up with our top 10 IS journals and we're not a lot to go beyond 10 And we have to rank them in order. It has to have a reward in there and we have to have a logic and we'll put the logic for why one So for example ISJ EJs and JIT you and I have to go back and forth and we have to actually rank those three Strength of editorial board. We have to look at some of the metrics We whatever and look at the papers, right? I don't know But I think what we should do is make our top 10 list and Really go out of the way of combining our Patriotism or what would you call it partisanship for yes? It is good. Yeah, that's important We need to promote things that are IS focused and not Publications that are else severe or wily or whatever right so so if you're else severe wily in the record ranking We will demote you a little bit You'll be below your weight if you're not if you're iis if you're ais if you're if you're ACM if you're iEEE we will promote you informs right we promote you a little And it'll be pure is so we don't count management science. We don't count organization science which both publish IS papers We don't count AMR and AMJ even though you know same thing. Yep, so we don't we're we're only talking pure is papers and we will discount Uh Like niche journals. Yeah, we will discount publish publisher and people so we will do this But if you're listening you can do the same thing you can reply to a LinkedIn post or whatever Give us your list, but don't just give us 10 journals. They have to be in order And you have to have a clear system of justification Write your arguments and tell us tell us which journal we missed tell us which journal we missed And then I think we should have our ranking and the ranking should only have 10 journals and it should go 1 to 10 What are the the top IS journals and I know you want to have three or four But you know, I think we need to well if you have a system of 10 you can you can have a cut off line somewhere I got to two after three after four whatever I can put them in different tiers whatever Okay, let's do this and people Uh, let us know as well and then we you know if we crosshose a few perspectives Then we'll probably get some nice aggregate view of what the field thinks what the top two journals are So help us this 2026 you and I are going to have a rigorous ranking and we'll have justification for our ranking Right here of rigorous ranking. I like that. It's not a list. It's not a journal list. It's a ranking Right. We're first one two three. It's four. Yeah. All right. This is good. This is good This was the start to yet another season yet another six dude Wow Six years what it's the start of the six year. So people we're back You know the biweekly dose we have a few guests line up We're always happy to hear suggestions for other guests for other topics where we should talk about and on that you'll get You usually spill off and they can I running on both on certain topics neck was good to get this going again Can't wait for the next one. See you all right record. See you next time