Impact Factors of Supply Chain Management Journals
Note: The following text refers to a previous version of the JCR impact factors. A more recent version are the 2018 JCR impact factors (see there).
More than many other management disciplines, SCM has been very successful to professionalize and reinvent itself. A good indication for this development are the 2017 JCR journal impact factors, which have just been released. Many, although not all, impact factors of SCM journals have improved. The journal with the highest impact factor among SCM journals and the seventh-highest one among more than 200 management journals is Journal of Supply Chain Management (6.105). Three SCM journals have impact factors between 4 and 5: Journal of Operations Management (4.899), International Journal of Production Economics (4.407) and International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management (4.215). IJPDLM is now even the Emerald journal with the highest impact factor, which is a great achievement! Two other SCM journals range between 3 and 4: Supply Chain Management: An International Journal (3.833) and Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management (3.667), but International Journal of Operations & Production Management (2.955) and Journal of Business Logistics (2.891) also come close to 3. Both International Journal of Logistics Management (1.776) and Decision Sciences (1.641) were able to improve their impact factors and get closer to 2. It might take some time until our journals will finally be acknowledged by qualitative rankings such as CABS’s AJG and VHB-JOURQUAL, as such rankings tend to be quite conservative. However, with such high impact factors there should be no doubt anymore that SCM plays in the same league as accounting, marketing and finance.
Should We “Bulldoze” the Business School?
The Guardian has recently published an interesting article with a provoking title: Why We Should Bulldoze the Business School. The author writes: “[In] the business school, both the explicit and hidden curriculums sing the same song. The things taught and the way that they are taught generally mean that the virtues of capitalist market managerialism are told and sold as if there were no other ways of seeing the world.” The author demands “an entirely new way of thinking about management, business and markets” and argues: “If we want those in power to become more responsible, then we must stop teaching students that heroic transformational leaders are the answer to every problem, or that the purpose of learning about taxation laws is to evade taxation, or that creating new desires is the purpose of marketing. In every case, the business school acts as an apologist, selling ideology as if it were science.” To what extent does that also apply for our SCM courses?
