Home Economics Deans' and Department Chairpersons' Perceptions of Journals and the Importance of Faculty Publishing

Home Economics Deans’ and

Department Chairpersons’ Perceptionsof Journals and the Importance of

Faculty Publishing

Elizabeth B. Goldsmith, Robert J. Thoresen,Ronald E. Goldsmith

Authors’ addresses: E. B. Goldsmith, Home andFamily Life, Florida State University, Tallahassee,FL 32306; R. J. Thoresen, U.S. Army, H. Q. 5thCorps, Attn: AETV-DCA-C, APO, NY 09079; R. E.Goldsmith, Marketing, Florida State University,Tallahassee, FL 32306.

Seventy-five administrators of home economics programs rated 18 journals forfamiliarity and perceived quality. The Journals to which the most subscribed werethe Journal of Home Economics (92%) and the Home Economics Research Journal(82%). The administrators rated the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition highestin quality. Almost all administrators stated that publishing is becoming moreimportant in their evaluations of faculty. Data were collected on administrators’specializations and on the characteristics of responding administrators’ institu-tions. The growing stress on faculty publishing is evidenced at both small andlarge institutions, although in the past it was less emphasized at smaller colleges.Institution size is a factor in actual publishing productivity in that larger schoolstend to have more prolific authors.

As every professor has experienced, theperceptions that an administrator holds ofjournals in which a professor publishes is acrucial factor in the administrator’s assess-ment of the faculty member’s production, ul-timately affecting that individual’s tenure,promotion, and pay (Katz, 1973; Miller, 1976;Seldin, 1976). In most departments or col-leges, the chief administrator relies on his or

her own intuition or knowledge of the jour-nals (Katz, 1973). Therefore, administrators’perceptions of journals based on their famil-iarity and notions of quality have a critical im-pact on faculty careers and advancement.

Besides the issue of career impact, admin-istrators’ perceptions of journals have beenstudied as part of a body of research known asjournal analysis. journal analysis refers to themeasurement of the regular and systematicchanges in one or more aspects of journalsover time. It is useful because it provides anobjective means by which trends and direc-tions in a discipline can be traced, based onthe assumption that journals offer a format forresearch presentations reflecting a disci-

pline’s progress.Journal analysis studies have been con-

ducted in a variety of fields such as sociology(Broadus, 1952) and psychology (Mace &Warner, 1973). One area of journal analysis

The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistanceof John McCullers, Stephen Jorgensen, and fouranonymous reviewers for their constructivecomments.

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focuses on determining quality and familiar-ity. Journal quality and familiarity studies areundertaken for two main reasons; first, toguide potential contributors to journals(Mace & Warner, 1973) and second, to assistadministrators in making decisions about anindividual faculty member’s promotion andtenure (Buss & McDermott, 1976). Peery andAdams (1981) argue that if research is to havemaximum impact, the most visible and credi-ble outlets should be sought. In a multidisci-plinary field such as human development,they point out that qualitative evaluation ofjournals should be beneficial in assisting re-searchers in their publishing efforts.

Specific studies on journal quality and fa-miliarity have been performed in accounting(Benjamin & Brenner, 1974; Liao & Boock-

holdt, 1983); marketing (Browne & Becker,1977); sociology (Glenn, 1971); human devel-opment (Muller-Brettel & Dixon, 1985; Peery& Adams, 1981); business (Coe & Weinstock,1969); biology, biochemistry, chemistry,physics, and mathematics (Narin, Carpenter,& Berlt,1972); and psychology (Koulack & Ke-

selman, 1975). Liao and Boockholdt (1983),Browne and Becker (1977), and Mace andWarner (1973) focused particular attention onthe opinions of administrators.The Browne and Becker study (1977) is rep-

resentative of research in this arena. Browneand Becker divided their administrators intotwo groups: those from business schools with60 or more faculty, and those with fewer than60 faculty. They found that faculty size had nosignificant effect on familiarity or quality rat-ings of 53 journals. Familiarity and quality rat-ings were also not highly correlated. They didfind that the influence of publication on fac-ulty evaluation was becoming more importantin schools of every size. Administrators fromsmaller schools reported that they empha-sized publishing in the past to a lesser degreethan did administrators of larger schools. In

regard to actually publishing, approximatelyone-half of the smaller schools had a majorityof their faculty publish during the past year,while two-thirds of the larger schools had amajority of their faculty publish during thepast year.

Although journal quality rating studies haveproliferated in recent years, they have notbeen received without criticism. One oftencited limitation is that little is known aboutthe respondents’ motives or criteria for rank-ing a journal (Hogan & Hedgepeth, 1983;Hohn & Fine, 1973; Pinski & Narin, 1979).Journal reviewers, members of professionalassociations, authors, and administrators areall going to have biases. Whether one agreeswith them or not, however, administrators’perceptions of journals have to be consideredbecause it is part of their job to judge facultypublications; hence, deans’ and chairper-sons’ ratings of journals provide interestingand valid data (Buss, 1975).The Peery and Adams (1981) study of quality

ratings of human development journals illus-trates the possible effects individual bias mayhave on journal perceptions. In their study,Child Development was given the highestmean familiarity rank out of 165 social sciencejournals. Peery and Adams were quick topoint out that this high familiarity rating waspartially explained by the fact that each re-

spondent in their study subscribed to ChildDevelopment by virtue of their membershipin the Society for Research in Child Develop-ment, the population from which the samplewas drawn. Perhaps the best way to look atjournal quality studies and the methodologiesthereof is to view them as providing pieces ofinformation about the complex world of pub-lishing and academicians’ perspectives onthat world. The present study builds on pre-vious studies in journal analysis and is part ofthe stream of journal analysis research spe-cific to home economics.

Compared with many other fields of study,home economics is relatively new to journalanalysis research. Montgomery and Ritchey(1975) analyzed articles published in home

economics-related journals from 1971 to 1973,and a decade later their study was replicatedby Ritchey, Lovingood, and Sweat (1985).Goldsmith (1983) analyzed information pro-vided in the Home Economics Research Jour-nal, 1972-1980, in regard to authors’ affilia-

tions, funding sources, topics, and citations.In a subsequent study, Goldsmith (1984) rank

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ordered the most prolific authors in theHome Economics Research Journal and theJournal of Home Economics. Her findings em-phasized the role administrators play in moti-vating and evaluating faculty members’ pub-lication output. Additional journal analysis re-search on specific areas within homeeconomics has been conducted in housing(Tremblay, 1982); consumer, consumption,and family economics/home management(Abdel-Ghany & Nichols, 1984); clothing andtextiles (Hutton, 1984); and home economicseducation (Wallace & Hall, 1984).Although much has been done in home

economics journal analysis in the last decade,a significant avenue has not yet been ex-plored. No nationwide, full-scale evaluationof journal quality and/or familiarity has beenconducted. One attempt in this directionfailed from poor response. In the April 1983issue of AHEA Action, the American HomeEconomics Association Publications AdvisoryCommittee printed a questionnaire request-ing AHEA members to rate the value of and torecommend changes in the following AHEApublications: Journal of Home Economics,Home Economics Research Journal, AB-fEA Ac-tion, and Washington Dateline (B. Braun,chair of the AHEA Publications Advisory Com-mittee, personal communication, January 9,1984). The committee believed that it couldnot draw any conclusions from this survey be-cause only 30 responses were received fromthe 33,000 members polled.The present study was undertaken for four

purposes: first, to determine administrators’familiarity with and quality rankings of jour-nals commonly used by home economists;second, to relate the ratings to faculty size ofthe home economics unit the administrators

represent; third, to determine what views ad-ministrators hold about the importance ofpublishing; and fourth, to determine if size ofinstitution was related to the importanceplaced on publishing.The following hypotheses were formulated

on the basis of prior research: i1. There is a positive relationship between

faculty size and journal quality rankings.2. There is a positive relationship between

faculty size and the familiarity rankings ofjournals.

3. Administrators who subscribe to jour-nals will give them higher familiarity and qual-ity rankings than those who do not.

4. There is a positive linear relationship be-tween familiarity and perceived quality ofjournals.

5. Home economics administrators now

place greater emphasis on publishing thanthey have in the past.

6. There is a positive relationship betweenfaculty size and the importance placed onpublishing.

7. There is a positive relationship betweensize of institution and amount of faculty pub-lishing.The Browne and Becker (1977) findings pro-

vided a rationale for hypotheses one, two,four, five, six, and seven. The third hypothe-sis was included to investigate the relation-ship between subscribership and familiarityand perceived quality as alluded to, but notmeasured by, Peery and Adams (1981).

METHOD

The sample consisted of the administratorsof the 130 home economics departments,schools, and colleges listed in either Peter-son’s Annual Guide to Graduate Study (1982)or Graduate Programs and Admissions Man-ual, 1981-1983 (1983). The envelopes contain-ing the questionnaires, which were sent inlate 1983 and early 1984, were addressed towhomever was designated as the head of thehome economics unit.To maximize the response rate and avoid

fatiguing respondents, the journal list was

purposely kept short yet still representative ofcommonly used home economics-based orrelated journals. The 18 journals selectedwere chosen by a two-step process. First,Goldsmith (1983) provided a list of the 15 mostcited journals in the Home Economics Re-search Journal; the list was used in the presentstudy with the exception of the three leastcited journals: the Journal of American OilChemists Society, the journal of Genetic Psy-

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chology, and Cereal Chemistry. Montgomeryand Ritchey (1975) provided the second stepfor selecting journal titles. In 1973, they de-veloped a list of 38 salient journals by askingfaculty members in the College of Home Eco-nomics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute andState University to compile a list of journalsthey used most. This method was replicatedin a fall 1983 study at a major southern uni-versity in which members of the college ofHome Economics graduate faculty were askedto submit a list of five journals they used mostoften in their reading and research. If two ormore faculty indicated a journal title not al-ready on the list of 12 derived from Goldsmith(1983), then that journal was added to the list.This procedure yielded six additional titles.Three blank spaces were provided on thequestionnaire so respondents could add titleswhich they believed were left out.The first section of the questionnaire con-

tained the 18 journal titles listed in alphabet-ical order followed by a Likert-type scale onwhich respondents circled their choices onquality (unaware, lowest quality, good qual-ity, high quality, highest quality) and on famil-iarity (unaware, slightly familiar, somewhat fa-miliar, very familiar). This rating scale wassimilar to the one developed by Browne andBecker (1977). Respondents also circled &dquo;yes&dquo;or &dquo;no&dquo; to answer the question &dquo;Do you sub-scribe to this journal?&dquo; Demographic ques-tions were asked on the second page aboutthe respondent’s institution, number of stu-dents, and number of full-time faculty. Ad-ministrators were also asked their opinionsabout faculty publishing and were asked toreport the amount of publishing done by theirfaculty.A cover letter explained the purpose of the

study. Responses were anonymous unless therespondent chose to identify himself or her-self in order to obtain a copy of the findings.Respondents had the option of stating theirarea of expertise. A post card reminder wasmailed one month after the questionnaire.One hundred and thirty questionnaires

were sent, six were returned as non-

deliverable, one was returned inadequatelyanswered, and 75 (60.5%) were returned in

usable form. The response rate was far

greater than the one for the AHEA Actionstudy (B. Braun, personal communication,January 9, 1984; less than 1 %) and comparableto the 45.5% response rate of Liao and Boock-holdt (1983) and the 64% response rate ofBrowne and Becker (1977).

RESULTS

Thirty-nine (52%) of the 75 survey respon-dents stated their area of specialization.These were as follows: home economics ed-ucation (9); food and nutrition (10); family re-lationships, child development, home man-agement, family economics, and consumeraffairs (10); and clothing and textiles (10).~The respondents added 44 names of other

journals to the list of 18 provided, but no onejournal stood out as being grossly over-looked. The Journal of Home Economics wasthe journal to which the greatest number ofrespondents (92%) subscribed, and the Amer-ican Sociological Review was the jou rnal towhich the fewest (3%) subscribed.

Table 1 (p. 188) presents the mean familiar-ity and perceived quality scores for 18 jour-nals listed in rank order by mean quality rat-ings. Respondents who indicated being un-aware of a particular journal were removedfrom the analysis so that familiarity and qual-ity values in Table 1 represent responses onlyfrom respondents who indicated awarenessof an individual journal.The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition

was rated highest in quality, followed by the

1 An analysis was performed to assess whether the spe-cialty of the administrator had an effect on the familiarityand quality ratings. Approximately half of the study’s re-spondents were categorized by specialty where it was

given, and a series of 36 one-way ANOVAS tested differ-ences in mean familiarity and mean quality by area ofspecialization. A few of the analyses showed, as onewould expect, that administrators tended to be more fa-miliar with journals in their own area of expertise, but notto rate their own journals higher in quality. The smallnumber of administrators available for these analyses andthe problem of an experiment-wise error rate across somany ANOVAS led the authors to not include this as part ofthe main analysis.

188

189

journal of Nutrition, Journal of Marriage andthe Family, and the Journal of American Di-etetics Association. The lowest rated journalfor quality was Housing and Society.The highest familiarity rating went to the

Journal of Home Economics, foilowed by theHome Economics Research Journal. Althoughadministrators were highly familiar with thesejournals, they did not rank them as highly onquality, although the 10th-ranked Home Eco-nomics Research journal fared better than the17th-ranked Journal. of Home Economics.

For purposes of testing hypotheses one andtwo the respondents were divided into twogroups: those administrators with 19 or fewer

faculty (62.7%) and those with 20 or more full-time faculty (37.3%). There were no signifi-cant differences in mean familiarity and qual-ity ratings for any journal between the twogroups.

Hypothesis three, the relationship betweensubscription and perceived quality and famil-iarity, was tested on a journal-by-journal basisby testing for mean differences in quality andfamiliarity ratings for subscribers and non-subscribers. Because many of these tests

compared groups of quite different size andthe scores were often not normally distrib-uted, both t-tests and the more conservativeMann-Whitney U test were used. The resultsshowed that the non-parametric test yieldedvirtually identical results, so the more familiarparametric results are shown in Table 1. Over-all, the results support hypothesis three. Asmight be expected, for every journal, sub-scribers rated themselves as more familiarwith the journal than non-subscribers. Withthe exceptions of the American SociologicalReview, Journal of Home Economics, andHome Economics Research Journal, these dif-ferences were statistically significant (p <

.05). For only the Journal of Personality andSocial Psychology did the nonparametric testyield a result different from the t-test. Themean familiarity rating for this journal was notsignificantly different between the twogroups by this test (U = 50.5, Z = 1.87, p =.06). For seventeen of the journals the qualityrating was higher for subscribers than non-subscribers, but the mean differences were

statistically significant (p < .05) for only sevenjournals.

Hypothesis four, that familiarity and per-ceived quality are related, was tested by com-puting Pearson correlation coefficients be-tween quality and familiarity scores for eachjournal. Table 1 shows that for 17 of the 18journals these correlations were positive andsignificant, ranging from .33 to .75, with amean r of .51. Because the samples for each ofthese tests were not identical, the Fisher Ztransformation was used to transform eachcorrelation coefficient. The average of thesevalues was .55, indicating a moderate positiverelation between perceived quality and famil-iarity. The correlations were also computedby Spearman’s rho with virtually identical re-sults.The Spearman rank order correlation coef-

ficient was computed between familiarity andperceived quality for the 18 journals. Thisvalue was .43 (p = .039) which is in close

agreement with the individual correlationsdiscussed in the previous paragraph. To eval-uate the possibility that the age of the journalsmight have influenced the ratings, Spearmanrank order correlation coefficients were com-

puted between journal age and the ratings.The coefficients were .29 and .26 for familiar-

ity and perceived quality, respectively. Thesevalues were not statistically different (p >

.05). The size of the correlation values, how-ever, suggests that the age of the journal mayhave some influence on familiarity and per-ceptions of quality. A partial correlation of fa-miliarity with quality rankings with age ofjournal held constant, however, confirmedthat age of journal had little if any influenceon the familiarity and quality rankings.

Hypothesis five is supported in that nearlyevery administrator (84% or 63 out of the 75

respondents) said that publishing is becom-

ing more important in their evaluation of fac-ulty. This held true regardless of faculty sizeor institution size. When asked how impor-tant publishing had been in the past, only 28%of the administrators said that it was very im-

portant.Hypothesis six is supported in that there

was a moderate positive correlation (r = .33,

190

p = .002) between faculty size and the impor-tance placed on publishing.

Hypothesis seven is supported in that overa one-year period, the larger the size of theinstitution, the more faculty have actuallypublished (r = .36, p = .001).

DISCUSSION

Journal analysis provides a means for as-sessing key aspects of a discipline. Thepresent study provides survey results that in-dicate how administrators in home econom-ics rate the quality and familiarity of journalsthat they and their faculties use. One findingof the study was that there were no significantdifferences in the perceived quality and famil-iarity ratings between schools with large andsmall numbers of full-time faculty. This find-ing is consistent with Browne and Becker’s(1977) findings that faculty size did not make asignificant difference in the evaluation of mar-keting journals.As might be expected, familiarity and sub-

scriptions were positively related for mostjournals. Journal subscription was not ashighly related to perceived quality as it was tofamiliarity.With the exception of one journal, Journal

of Home Economics, quality and familiaritywere positively correlated, as hypothesized.This finding differs from the Browne andBecker (1977) study in which familiarity wasnot strongly related to the perceived qualityof 53 journals. This may be because they in-cluded trade journals along with more aca-demic journals, whereas the present studyrated only academic journals. A good exam-ple in the Browne and Becker study is Adver-tising Age, a trade journal, which ranked 4 infamiliarity and 41 in quality. They observedthat trade journals, which normally do notpublish articles written by academicians, gen-erally had lower quality ratings.Compared with journal quality studies in

other fields, the relatively low ranking of theJournal of Home Economics and the HomeEconomics Research Journal is unusual; typi-cally the two principal journals in a discipline

are ranked at or very near the top of journallists (Browne & Becker, 1977; Liao & Boock-

holdt, 1983). We can only speculate about thereasons for this perception; perhaps it re-

flects our diversity as a discipline or differ-ences in journals quality based on the journals’target markets. It should be noted that theJournal of Home Economics publishes somearticles by non-academics and has undergoneconsiderable changes since the administra-tors responded to this questionnaire. Admin-istrators expressed high familiarity with boththe Journal of Home Economics and theHome Economics Research Journal.There is consistency between some of the

present study’s findings and the Peery andAdams (1981) study and the Koulack and Ke-selman (1975) study in that all of them rankedChild Development above DevelopmentalPsychology in terms of perceived quality.Comparisons beyond this point are difficult tomake across studies in regard to journal rank-ings because samples and journal titles differso much between disciplines.As in all journal analysis, a future update

will be needed to observe changes in journalrankings. Studies in other fields have demon-strated that slight changes in the rankingstake place over time (Benjamin & Brenner,1974; Liao & Boockholdt, 1983). With the pas-sage of time, new journal titles might need tobe added, others deleted. The data for thisstudy were collected in late 1983 and early1984. Ten-year updates are commonly done inother disciplines.Most journal analyses (such as the present

study) ask administrators only to rank thejournals on familiarity and quality; they arenot asked to explain why (on what basis ) theyhad made these rankings. This could be atopic for future research. For comparison pur-poses it would be interesting to gain rankingsand explanations from knowledgeable per-sons and experts in addition to administra-

fiors, such as prolific journal authors, journalreviewers, faculty, and members of variousassociations. Koulack and Keselman (1975),for example, found that the quality rankingsof ten top psychology journals varied depend-ing on their raters’ work and interests. They

191

did not find, however, that the rankings wererelated to submissions, rejections, or sub-scriptions.The findings about administrators’ views on

the importance of publishing confirm whatmost academics already have experienced;namely, that administrators view publishingnow as more important in faculty evaluationsthan they did previously. The growing stresson faculty publishing is evidenced at bothsmall and large institutions, although tradi-tionally it was less important at smallerschools. There appears to be a gap between

expectations and actual production in that

larger schools have more prolific facultymembers. These findings on importance ofpublishing, faculty production, and facultyand institution size are similar to those found

by Browne and Becker (1977).The research findings presented provide

several implications for faculty, administra-tors, journal editors, and editorial reviewboards. Since administrators’ perceptions ofjournals are important to faculty members’tenure, promotions, and salary (Katz, 1973;Miller, 1976; Seldin, 1976), faculty might con-sider the journal rankings when decidingwhere to place future articles if the articles

might fit equally well into several different

journals. If maximum impact is a goal, thenthe most visible and credible outlets shouldbe sought (Peery & Adams, 1981). Of course,in considering the quality and familiarity rank-ings in Table 1, a faculty member should keepin mind that administrators’ views are onlyone criterion in choosing a journal in which topublish. Of primary importance should be theappropriateness of the journal to the type ofarticle being submitted. Administrators mightexamine the hierarchy to determine how con-sistent it is with their own rankings. If journalrankings are already being used by their de-partment, school, or college, then these rank-ings could be compared with the list given inthis article. Journal editors and editorial re-

view boards might consider the implicationsthe rankings have for their own and compet-itive journals. Further, they might ask them-selves why the American Journal of ClinicalNutrition is so highly rated. The present study

suggests it is not simply because most admin-istrators are specialists in food and nutritionand therefore have a bias toward this journal.Conversely, editors and review boards mightask themselves why certain journals are at thebottom of the list. What is being done pres-ently and what can be done in the future toimprove their standings? !f a journal’s farnil-iarity ranking is low, what can be done to im-prove its visibility? Faculty members mightalso note the low familiarity ratings of somejournals. If these are journals in which theypublish, then their administrators might needto become better acquainted with the journaloverall as well as with their individual articlesat faculty evaluation times.

In conclusion, because publication is

among the important criteria in the evaluationof faculty, and emphasis on publishing is in-creasing, the evaluation of journals by admin-istrators on a national scale provides muchuseful information. The findings presentedhere also contribute to the growing field ofjournal analysis within home economics andto the wider research stream of journa! anal-ysis that transcends disciplinary boundaries.

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Received February 3, 1988; accepted May 5, 1988.