Footnote Publishing in a prestigious journal enhances the visibility of the author, the author’s institution, and the work itself. It accelerates career progression, is a key factor in tenure cases, and sometimes results in substantial monetary bonuses (Fuyuno & Cyranoski, Reference Fuyuno and Cyranoski2006; Quan et al., Reference Quan, Chen and Shu2017). The Oxford American Dictionary defines prestige as “widespread respect and admiration felt for someone or something on the basis of a perception of their achievements or quality.” Prestigious journals, therefore, are those that are widely admired for publishing quality scholarship.
Arguably, journal prestige indicates which journals should be followed, and signals the quality of works published within. There is considerable concern, however, that the traditional indicators of prestige result in the proverbial tail wagging the dog. In the area of management scholarship, for example, journals that publish research aimed at an academic audience have higher impact factors and are viewed as more prestigious than journals that publish research aimed at both academics and practitioners (Extejt & Smith, Reference Extejt and Smith1990). Campbell and Wilmot (Reference Campbell, Wilmot, Ones, Anderson, Viswesvaran and Sinangil2018) noted that excessive striving for high impact factors results in the publication of “theory for theory’s sake” and a significant neglect of the critical workplace issues that need to be addressed with empirical research.
In addition, times are changing in the scientific publication realm. As electronic publishing has become ubiquitous in our field, it has changed how journal articles are consumed. With increased electronic access, the number of people who have hard copies of journals sitting in their offices has shrunk. This change in science dissemination may make journal prestige less relevant than previously. On the other hand, with a vast increase in the amount of scientific information available to us, journal prestige may be increasingly used as a surrogate for article quality. Given these changes, as well as the important role that journal prestige plays in our discipline, it is important to update the survey of journal prestige published 18 years earlier (Zickar & Highhouse, Reference Zickar and Highhouse2001).
We set out to examine journal prestige within the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) community using a similar methodology as Zickar and Highhouse (Reference Zickar and Highhouse2001). Our approach was to survey SIOP members concerning the prestige and usefulness of the scholarly journals in management and applied psychology. Collecting the impressions of the SIOP community is consistent with the basic meaning of prestige (i.e., others’ admiration based on quality) and allowed us to compare impressions across relevant constituencies (e.g., psychology professors versus management professors). Using the survey approach also allowed us to assess the degree to which different work settings (e.g., applied versus academic) influenced the perceived usefulness of different journals. Finally, the results of our survey are compared to our earlier effort. In the concluding remarks, we use this comparison to speculate on the nature of industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology as we approach the 2020s.
Indices of journal prestige
The most widely acknowledged measure of journal prestige is the journal impact factor (JIF). The JIF expresses how often the typical article in a journal is cited in a given time period. Specifically, it includes in the numerator the total number of citations of articles that were published in a 2-year window over the total number of articles published in that window. The JIF was originated to meet the needs of university librarians looking for an objective method for selecting journals for their library holdings. Archambault and Larivière (Reference Archambault and Larivière2009) noted, however, that the JIF has become the predominate measure of journal and researcher stature. The authors note that there are problems with this state of affairs, including (a) a built-in bias favoring US journals, (b) widely varying JIF scores across fields and across specialties within fields, (c) vulnerability to inflation by journal self-citations, (d) vulnerability to inflation by publishing review articles and meta-analyses, and (e) an arbitrary citation window that penalizes some fields or specialties within fields.
One alternative to the JIF is the h-index, developed by Hirsch (Reference Hirsch2005). The h-index attempts to balance quality and quantity—calculated as the h number of published articles that have been cited h or more times. A journal with a 5-year h-index of 20, for example, will have published 20 articles that were cited 20 or more times. This index is less sensitive than the JIF to journals with articles that are citation outliers. A limitation of the h-index, however, is that it penalizes journals that publish fewer articles. And, like the JIF, the h-index can vary widely across fields and specialties within fields.
Assessing prestige by way of audience perceptions, the approach used here, comes with its own set of issues. People may assign higher ratings to journals in which they have published or in which they hold editorial positions. This may occur from unintentional biases (familiarity-attraction, availability) or from motivations for self-enhancement. Although perception-based ratings are likely influenced by knowledge of a journal’s impact factor, a recent meta-analysis across disciplines is not suggestive of extensive contamination (Mahmood, Reference Mahmood2017).
As noted earlier, one advantage of using perception-based measures of prestige is that the approach is highly consistent with the definition of prestige (i.e., widespread agreement about quality). This approach also allowed us to compare the impressions of different constituencies within SIOP, and also to assess the degree to which members actually read articles from the various journals.
Do different constituencies view the journals differently?
Judge (Reference Judge2003) observed that many faculty members in business schools implicitly view I-O psychology as having “no proper place in management research” (p. 57). As such, Judge argued, micro journals are not afforded the same status as macro management journals. This presents a quandary for I-O psychologists who hold faculty positions in business schools. They may desire visibility among their fellow SIOP members; yet, they may feel pressure to submit their work to journals more highly valued by their management colleagues and business school leadership (Ryan & Ford, Reference Ryan and Ford2010; Zickar & Highhouse, Reference Zickar and Highhouse2017). I-O psychologists in business schools are also likely to experience more subtle changes in their own views about the relevance of management scholarship and its outlets. Vroom (in Lawler et al., Reference Lawler, Cranny, Campbell, Schneider, MacKinney, Vroom and Carlson1971) asserted that faculty who move from psychology departments to business schools reduce contacts with other psychologists and psychological research, and focus more on training future managers than on training future psychologists. Ryan and Ford (Reference Ryan and Ford2010) similarly asserted that one’s employment setting profoundly affects the salience of one’s identity as an I-O psychologist. Accordingly, the Academy of Management (AOM) conference gradually becomes more important than SIOP as one’s primary professional affiliation (Aguinis et al., Reference Aguinis, Bradley and Brodersen2014). We expected therefore that academic SIOP members who reside in business schools would assign greater prestige and relevance to top management journals than do academic SIOP members who reside in psychology departments.
Working in an applied versus academic setting is also likely to influence perceptions of journals—specifically with regard to their usefulness (Ones et al., Reference Ones, Kaiser, Chamorro-Premuzic and Svensson2017; Ryan & Ford, Reference Ryan and Ford2010). The perceived gap between research and practice in I-O has been well documented (e.g., Anderson et al., Reference Anderson, Herriot and Hodgkinson2001; Rynes-Weller, Reference Rynes-Weller and Kozlowski2012; Tkachenko et al., Reference Tkachenko, Hahn and Peterson2017), and there appears to be two main reasons that many I-O psychologists in practice may not find I-O journals useful: (1) They do not find I-O research relevant, and (2) they do not believe it. Regarding relevance, many have suggested that the vast majority of I-O research is devoid of practical relevance (e.g., Campbell & Wilmot, Reference Campbell, Wilmot, Ones, Anderson, Viswesvaran and Sinangil2018; Ones et al., Reference Ones, Kaiser, Chamorro-Premuzic and Svensson2017), or that it fails to focus on the topics of interest to consultants (Blanton, Reference Blanton2000). There is considerable evidence for the second reason as well. Rynes et al. (Reference Rynes, Colbert and O’Boyle2018) suggested that there is universally considerable doubt about the usefulness of academic research, as well as about the credibility of academics. The authors note that highly publicized examples of non-replication and data falsification have led many to view I-O research with skepticism. In addition, many practitioners simply reject the idea that traditional academic research is capable of informing their specific practice (e.g., Blanton, Reference Blanton2000; Silzer & Jeanneret, Reference Silzer and Jeanneret2011). Blanton (Reference Blanton2000) argued that consultants do not apply research but, instead, engage in a “dialectic practice” that is not easily articulated. Jeanneret and Silzer (Reference Jeanneret and Silzer2011) similarly suggested that traditional research approaches do not lend themselves to the study of executive assessment (cf., Kuncel & Highhouse, Reference Kuncel and Highhouse2011).
We should point out that there are a number of practitioners who contribute to scholarship, and who serve on editorial boards and as editors for many I-O journals. Many of these scholarly-oriented practitioners, however, believe that the academic journals have increasingly neglected the concerns of practitioners (Cucina et al., Reference Cucina, Hayes, Walmsley and Martin2014; Ones et al., Reference Ones, Kaiser, Chamorro-Premuzic and Svensson2017). We expected, therefore, that academic SIOP members would assign greater relevance to flagship I-O journals than do practitioner SIOP members.
Are there changes in the journal landscape?
Aguinis et al. (Reference Aguinis, Bradley and Brodersen2014) presented a provocative set of predictions about the future of I-O psychology scholarship. Because, according to those authors, the most influential I-O scholars are predominantly in business schools, the top I-O journals are edited by business school faculty. As such, these journals are increasingly emphasizing scholarship that is theoretical in nature. Moreover, the authors suggested that the journals would emphasize the “organizational” side of I-O psychology. Other authors have also observed a decline of interest in areas such as selection, performance evaluation, and training—areas where theory is less of an emphasis (Dilchert, Reference Dilchert2017; Ryan & Ford, Reference Ryan and Ford2010). Although a survey of journal prestige will not allow us to determine whether the major IO journals (e.g., Journal of Applied Psychology; Personnel Psychology) have succumbed to this “OB-ization” of scholarship, we are able to observe whether journals that continue to publish articles related to individual differences and selection are lower in prestige than those that publish research that is organizational in nature.
Highhouse and Schmitt (Reference Highhouse, Schmitt, Schmitt, Highhouse and Weiner2013) surveyed prominent scholars in I-O on their thoughts about the current state and future state of I-O psychology. One of the themes to emerge was the anticipated growth in research on worker well-being. Table 1 shows that, compared with the 2011 SIOP conference program, the 2019 program reveals an 80% increase in content related to the topic area “Occupational Health/Safety/Stress & Strain/Aging.” An even greater increase occurred for the topic area “Inclusion/Diversity.” We expected, therefore, that journals that publish research related to occupational health and work/life issues will be rated among the most prestigious, especially by those who work in departments of psychology.
Table 1. Comparison of SIOP submissions by topic area 2011 and 2019
* Adjusted by total number of submissions in each year.
Survey administration
We emailed SIOP members (n = 2996) who included email addresses in the membership directory, in November 2017, requesting responses to a survey on journal prestige. Furthermore, we included the request that journal editors and board members refrain from campaigning on behalf of their own journals—even if it is as subtle as encouraging board members to participate in the survey. We emphasized that the integrity and usefulness of the results depended on people responding honestly and without pressure from those who have interest in enhancing a particular journal’s prestige. We received responses from 557 members, 23% of which were practitioners. Of the 77% who were academics, 45% were located in departments of psychology, 52% were in business/labor and industrial relations (LIR), and 3% were in other departments or schools.
Participants were presented with a list of journals relevant to I-O appearing in either the Management or Applied Psychology lists of the SSCI journal rankings, along with other journals regularly publishing I-O–relevant scholarship. Participants were asked to place the journals into one of three tiers. Specifically, they were instructed as follows:
The first tier should be reserved for journals that present uniformly high-quality research and/or review articles. Articles in top tier journals should be both methodologically sound and important in advancing our knowledge base. Second tier journals should routinely have high quality articles. However, the quality of content is uneven. Third tier journals routinely publish articles with suspect methodology.
These instructions were consistent with those used by Zickar and Highhouse (Reference Zickar and Highhouse2001).
For each of the journals, SIOP members were also asked to indicate the journal’s relevance to them. Specifically, they were asked to indicate whether they regularly read the journal, skim the journal’s table of contents, and if the journal rarely publishes anything of interest to them.
Descriptive analyses
Prestige ratings
Table 2 shows the highest to lowest prestige ratings for the overall sample. Not surprisingly, Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP) and Personnel Psychology (PPsych) continue to be the flagship journals in I-O psychology. The top quartile of prestige also includes a large proportion of journals that are arguably more associated with management than with psychology (i.e., AMJ, AMR, ORM, JOM, ASQ). Table 3 shows mean prestige ratings by work setting. As you can see in bold, there are a handful of journals that are viewed at least one-half standard deviation more prestigious by faculty in departments of psychology, when compared with faculty in schools of business. Only one journal (i.e., OS) was viewed at least one-half standard deviation more prestigious by business faculty, when compared with psychology faculty. The Applied column in Table 3 highlights those journals viewed at least one-half standard deviation more prestigious by practitioners when compared with academics. One finding of interest is that many journals viewed more prestigious by practitioners are oriented toward measurement and/or assessment issues (i.e., APM, EPM, IJSA, PAID, PAD).
Table 2. Means and quartiles of journal prestige—overall sample
Note. Participants were asked to write in journals that they felt should have been included in the survey. The journals mentioned at least five times included Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (8), Organizational Psychology Review (8), Work, Aging, and Retirement (6), Psychological Methods (5), and Stress & Health (5).
Table 3. Mean journal prestige by work setting
a Indicates journals that psychology faculty rated higher than business faculty by .5 standard deviations or more.
b Indicates journals that business faculty rated higher than psychology faculty by .5 standard deviations or more.
c Indicates journals that practitioners rated higher than academics by .5 standard deviations or more.
By comparing responses to those made in an earlier survey of SIOP academics (Zickar & Highhouse, Reference Zickar and Highhouse2001), we were able to examine whether there is evidence for changes in the priorities of I-O scholars and the changing nature of I-O scholarship. Table 4 presents a comparison of journal prestige ratings conducted in 2000 (Zickar & Highhouse, Reference Zickar and Highhouse2001) with the prestige ratings from the current study. First, it should be noted that a number of journals included in the present study were not included in the earlier one. This is because the journals either did not exist in 2000 (e.g., AMLE, PAD) or because the topic of the journal has increased in prominence among I-O scholars (e.g., EJWOP, JOHP). As you can see, Applied Psychological Measurement (APM) is the only journal to decline in prestige more than one standard deviation. There is no clear pattern to the journals that increased or decreased in prestige, although one could speculate about shifts in journal focus, shifts in I-O scholar focus, or simply extraordinary marketing.Footnote 1
Table 4. Mean journal prestige 2000 vs. 2017
Note. Bolded items indicate a greater than .50 standard deviation change in prestige.
Table 5 shows a comparison of journal rankings by different indices of journal prestige. In general, there is much agreement across the indices. Rank-order correlations were conducted using Spearman’s Rho. These analyses revealed that prestige ratings correlated .71 with impact factor and .62 with h-index. The impact factor and h-index correlated .64. Table 5 does, however, reveal some anomalies. The h-index for Personality and Individual Differences (PAID), for instance, is considerably higher than its prestige rating or impact factor. This is likely because, as mentioned earlier, the h-Index can be sensitive to number of articles published by a journal.Footnote 2 Also, the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (OBHDP) is rated relatively high in prestige, despite ranking fairly low on the citation metrics. Obviously, SIOP members consider this journal to be among the top tier of journals in prestige.
Table 5. Journals ranked by different indices of journal prestige a
a Only includes journals for which all three indices were available.
b Because the 2017 figure was based on total cites over number of focal articles (excluding commentaries), this led to an implausibly large impact factor. Therefore, we used the 2016 impact factor for this journal.
Journal relevance
Recall that journal relevance was the degree to which people felt that the journal published research of interest to them. Table 5 provides mean journal relevance by work setting. This table shows that, compared with business faculty, psychology faculty viewed Personnel Assessment and Decisions (PAD) and Work & Stress (W&S) as substantially more relevant to their work. In contrast, compared with psychology faculty, business faculty viewed Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), Academy of Management Learning and Education (AMLE), and Academy of Management Review (AMR) as substantially more relevant to their work. When compared with academics, practitioners found Consulting Psychology Journal (CPJ) to be substantially more relevant to their work.
So, did different constituencies view the journals differently?
Psychology faculty vs. business faculty
Because one’s employment setting often influences one’s professional identity, we supposed that academic SIOP members who reside in business schools would assign greater prestige and relevance to management journals than would academic SIOP members who reside in psychology departments. As one possible test of this, we examined the average prestige assigned to flagship management journals (AMJ, AMR, JOM) by academic work setting. We found that business faculty saw these journals as more prestigious, t (402) = 3.24, p < .01, d = .32. And, they found them substantially more relevant t (393) = 7.27, p < .01, d = .72. To the extent that business-school faculty are predominate influencers of I-O psychology (see Aguinis et al., Reference Aguinis, Ramani, Campbell, Bernal-Turnes, Drewry and Edgerton2017), this suggests that management scholarship will continue to set the priorities for future I-O scholarship (Aguinis et al., Reference Aguinis, Bradley and Brodersen2014).
Aguinis et al. (Reference Aguinis, Bradley and Brodersen2014) suggested that journals publishing applied psychological research on the “I” side of I-O psychology were lower in prestige in business schools. We therefore examined differences between psychology and business faculty on perceptions of journals that focus specifically on these topics (i.e., HP, IJSA, PAD). We found that psychology faculty saw these journals as more prestigious, t (357) = 4.50, p < .01, d = .49, and more relevant t (353) = 4.21, p < .01, d = .46. Not mentioned by Aguinis et al. (Reference Aguinis, Bradley and Brodersen2014) was the growth of occupational health psychology and work/life issues within I-O psychology degree programs. We compared psychology and business faculty on the prestige of journals that focus specifically on these topics (i.e., JVB, JOHP, W&S). We found that psychology faculty saw these journals as substantially more prestigious, t (387) = 6.58, p < .01, d = .68, and relevant, t (365) = 5.03, p < .01, d = .53. Because I-O psychology programs appear to value these topics more than management departments, one might speculate that I-O programs will continue to attract the leading researchers in assessment, selection, occupational health, and worker well-being—topics that seem to be valued less in business schools.
Academics vs. practitioners
Given the well documented research–practice gap in I-O psychology, we expected that practitioners would view the flagship I-O journals as less relevant, as compared with SIOP members who work in an academic setting. We compared the perceived relevance of JAP and PPsych by work setting and found that, indeed, practitioners viewed these journals to be less relevant to their own work, t (511) = 6.65, p < .01, d = .67. It is also interesting to note on Table 6, however, that the top five most relevant journals to practitioners (i.e., IOP, TIP, JAP, PPsych, IJSA) included these flagship journals. Table 7 shows, for the journals ranking in the top quartile of prestige, the percentage of people indicating that the journal rarely publishes anything of interest to them. Only a relatively small proportion of practitioners indicated that the flagship I-O journals were rarely of interest. Although we realize that participation in our survey likely signaled at least some interest in academic journals, the findings suggest that the research–practice gap may not be as severe as is often claimed. Practitioners do find some of the I-O journals to be useful in their work.
Table 6. Mean journal relevance by work setting
a Indicates journals that psychology faculty rated higher than business faculty by .5 standard deviations or more.
b Indicates journals that business faculty rated higher than psychology faculty by .5 standard deviations or more.
c Indicates journals that practitioners rated higher than academics by .5 standard deviations or more.
Table 7. Percentage reporting rarely finding anything of interest in the most prestigious journals
The journal landscape
“O” vs. “I”
Because many prominent scholars have speculated on an increased emphasis on publishing organizational-behavior (OB) topics, at the expense of traditional assessment and selection topics, we expected to see an increase in the prestige of journals that focus specifically on OB topics (i.e., JOB, LQ). And, we expected to see a concurrent decrease in the prestige of journals that focus specifically on traditional I-side topics (i.e., IJSA, HP).Footnote 3 Inspection of Table 4 shows that, compared with data collected by Zickar and Highhouse (Reference Zickar and Highhouse2001), both Journal of Organizational Behavior (JOB) and Leadership Quarterly (LQ) have increased by more than one-half standard deviation in prestige since 2000. The picture for specialized assessment and selection journals is more mixed. Human Performance (HP) decreased in prestige by about one-quarter standard deviation since 2000. International Journal of Selection and Assessment (IJSA), however, increased by .4 standard deviation in prestige. Less ambiguous is the fact that, overall, HP and IJSA are held in lower esteem than JOB and LQ (Table 2).Footnote 4
Growth of occupational health psychology
Occupational health psychology (OHP) began to flourish in the mid-1990s. Important milestones were the establishment of the journal Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (JOHP), and the first American Psychological Association (APA)/National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) international conference on Work, Stress, and Health. Because the occupational health specialty within I-O is so new, the prominent OHP journals were not included in the original Zickar and Highhouse (Reference Zickar and Highhouse2001) survey of journal prestige within I-O. Figure 1 does, however, show the impact factors associated with specialty OHP journals between 2007 and 2017. HP and IJSA are included as points of contrast. We expected that the OHP journals would increase, while the traditional selection/assessment journals would remain relatively constant during this period. Trend analyses provided only partial support for this. JOHP exhibited a significant linear trend (r =.72). No other linear or quadratic terms were significant. Our survey showed that JOHP ranked 12th in prestige, and had the largest standard deviation in relevance to psychology faculty (Table 6). One survey participant commented, “My view is from someone who tends to do ‘I’ research and graduated over 20 years ago. I am still trying to wrap my head around OHP and other newer areas and their place in I-O psychology.”
Figure 1. 2007–2017 impact factors for OHP and selection/assessment specialty journals.
Participants’ thoughts on I-O journals
SIOP members were asked, at the end of the survey, to provide their thoughts on I-O journals. We received comments from 156 respondents and broke them up into 187 discrete observations (Svenson, Reference Svenson, Humphreys, Svenson and Vári1983). The authors coded each comment according to the themes that emerged. These data are reported in Table 8. Among the themes that emerged as important to the respondents was the general research–practice gap. Many believed that the journals had become too remote from practice issues. Another major theme was the perceived over-abundance of theory, and the requirement that every submission make a theoretical contribution. A related concern was the emphasis on OB in the journals, presumably because this represents a larger audience for the commercial management journals. Armstrong (Reference Armstrong1980) anticipated these issues when he observed a relation between “unintelligible management research” and academic prestige (Armstrong, Reference Armstrong1980).
Table 8. Open-ended comments of survey participants a
a The comments were independently categorized by the authors. Those that were assigned to the same category by two or more coders were assigned to that category.
In contrast to the concern with theory was the perception by many that the journals placed too much emphasis on quantitative and research methods. A number of participants felt that quantitative purity and complex designs took precedence over addressing interesting questions about behavior at work. In contrast, there were a number of survey respondents who felt that the I-O journals were on the correct course with regard to increasing quantitative complexity.
Finally, Table 8 shows that a number of SIOP members mentioned the need for greater access to the journals. Many felt that a move toward open-access journals would allow practitioners and international researchers to be exposed to the latest research. Five percent of the written comments addressed questionable research practices, a topic that is currently prominent given recent high-profile article retractions.
Concluding observations
This article is in the navel-gazing tradition of a number of articles published in this journal (e.g., Aguinis et al., Reference Aguinis, Bradley and Brodersen2014, Reference Aguinis, Ramani, Campbell, Bernal-Turnes, Drewry and Edgerton2017; Ryan & Ford, Reference Ryan and Ford2010; Weiss & Rupp, Reference Weiss and Rupp2011). Our survey results bear out many of the claims of these authors. Ryan and Ford (Reference Ryan and Ford2010), for instance, maintained that the identity of I-O psychology was at a “tipping point,” and that management scholarship was increasingly setting the priorities for I-O scholarship. This was reinforced by Aguinis et al.’s (Reference Aguinis, Ramani, Campbell, Bernal-Turnes, Drewry and Edgerton2017) observation that management scholarship dominated the content of I-O textbooks. The most prestigious journals identified in our survey are also dominated by management scholarship, and nearly all of them have chief editors located in business schools. We believe that the flight of prominent I-O psychologists from psychology departments to business schools has influenced the nature of the research published in our leading journals, as well as the nature of topics pursued by I-O scholars.
Aguinis et al. (Reference Aguinis, Bradley and Brodersen2014) asserted that I-O research would increasingly focus on OB, at the expense of topics such as talent attraction, assessment, acquisition, and development. Accordingly, we found that the journals that have most increased in prestige since our 2000 survey tend to be ones dominated by OB and management research. Journals that focus on those traditional I-side topics continue to languish at the bottom of prestige and influence. The irony here is that these are the journals publishing research of considerable applied value. Extejt and Smith (Reference Extejt and Smith1990) found that journals that published primarily for an academic audience were viewed by management professors as more prestigious than journals that published research aimed at both academics and practitioners. As noted by many of our participants, the theoretical demands placed on management research renders much of it irrelevant to pressing workplace issues (see also Campbell & Wilmot, Reference Campbell, Wilmot, Ones, Anderson, Viswesvaran and Sinangil2018). There is a critical need, therefore, for I-O psychologists to define “influential” in terms of both research and practice influence. Aguinis et al. (Reference Aguinis, Bradley and Brodersen2014, p. 297) observed the following about the movement of I-O faculty to business schools:
As the vast majority of the most influential I–O psychology researchers move to business schools and only a handful of programs housed in psychology departments remain strong regarding research productivity and influence, we predict that the production of the most influential I–O psychology knowledge will originate mainly in business schools.
Note that Aguinis and colleagues were talking about scholarly influence—not about actual influence on the workplace.
That journals publishing more I-side topics tend to be lower in prestige, especially among SIOP members who are in business schools, suggests that there could be further erosion of the topics in research by all I-O psychologists seeking to publish research to maximize impact factors. This could be injurious to the I-O field of study, which was built on a foundation of personnel selection and individual differences. It will also serve to increase the gap between research and practice—a leading topic of the open-ended comments in our survey.
The survey results do suggest that I-O faculty in psychology departments see selection-oriented journals (HP, IJSA, PAD) and well-being–oriented journals (JOHP, W&S) as more relevant to them, compared with faculty in business schools. The growth of OHP outlets, as well as their increasing prestige, provide another opportunity for I-O psychologists to distinguish themselves from management scholars, who have historically not pursued OHP topics. I-O programs will continue to attract the top researchers in talent management and OHP, which should result in the use of a broader set of journals for judging I-O program impact. Students aspiring to faculty positions in departments of psychology ought to be encouraged by the wider array of journals in which to publish.
Finally, we want to caution readers about the dangers of relying on any particular metric when judging scholarly impact. As noted in the introduction, there has been a creeping movement toward judging scholarly productivity with only a few quantitative indices. One danger of a sole reliance on impact factors is that they encourage behavior that is designed to maximize those indices. The field, as a whole, will suffer if the focus is on publishing only in the journals with the highest impact factors. The survey results presented here were designed to broaden the range of variables used to judge journal prestige, though we again caution that any particular index, including those presented in this article, should be evaluated critically.
