Syllabus Share: A New Metric for Gauging Journal Status

Abstract

Discussions about the status of scholarly journals in management have tended to revolve around impact factor and standing on relevant lists—cues whose validity has been oft-debated. We introduce a new metric for gauging the status of scholarly journals. Syllabus share represents the proportion of doctoral seminar syllabi comprised of articles from a given journal. We introduce this metric by drawing on a content analysis of 179 management doctoral syllabi (90 micro seminars, 89 macro seminars) from 53 business schools in North America, Europe, and Asia. Our results showed that syllabus share was distinct from impact factor and standing on relevant ranking and advisory lists. Moreover, syllabus share was correlated with perceptions of journal status on the part of both junior and senior scholars. Syllabus share provides a more continuous view of journal status (in contrast to lists) while allowing results to be contextualized (in contrast to impact factor). Our discussion focuses on the value of syllabus share for a more pluralistic conceptualization of journal status and its contributions to the scholarship of management education.