Ranking of institutions and academic journals : A selective review and a conceptual framework

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a selective review of literature and presents a conceptual framework in journal and institution rankings. Several streams of ranking literature are analyzed. Design/methodology/approach – The authors provide a conceptual framework to analyze the literature of journal and school ranking. Thus, several streams of ranking literature are analyzed to support the conceptual framework. Findings – Through the lens of a context-driven framework, the authors point to originality, utility, and timeliness as aspects that contribute to the recent increase of the ranking literature. Finally, the authors discuss other issues that arise within ranking due to subjective biases, institutional preferences and difficulties establishing weighting measurements, as well as the future direction of ranking. Research limitations/implications – The authors propose a context-based ranking framework to analyze rankings as factors that influence the environment may ultimately affect the usefulness of these rankings. It also implies that ranking of a journal or institution is a relative measure, as the context in which rankings are derived may change over time. Ultimately, the relative benchmarks used in the ranking will change as newer, more relevant metrics are developed. Originality/value – The conceptual framework is new and provides a useful benchmark to understand ranking of journals and school.