Now that I am back in the academic world again, I find myself visiting the Google Scholar search engine very frequently. There are several excellent tools there for researchers, which maybe I will write about later. But for today, I wanted to talk about the "2013 Scholar Metrics" that were released a few days ago.
The Scholar Metrics are a ranking of journals in every field, based on the number of citations that the articles in the journals get. You can browse all of the topics (Business, Health, Science, etc). When you browse for the journals, you are given their h5-Index and their h5-median scores. These scores show how often articles are cited from these publications, with the h5-median basically showing the distribution of the citations. (For more information, see this help page)
I went through and made a list of all of the top journals that were listed in "Humanities, Literature, and Arts" under the four subcategories of Humanities, Literature and Arts (General), English Language and Literature, Foreign Language Learning, and Language & Linguistics. Here are the 66 unique journals that I found, sorted by h5-median score.
- Journal of Memory and Language
- Language Learning
- Applied Linguistics
- The Modern Language Journal
- Language
- Linguistic Inquiry
- Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
- Language Resources and Evaluation
- Language and Cognitive Processes
- Journal of Pragmatics
- Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
- Journal of Phonetics
- Lingua
- Second Language Research
- Language Teaching
- Studies in Second Language Acquisition
- Journal of Child Language
- Language and Linguistics Compass
- English Language Teaching Journal
- Computer Assisted Language Learning
- Applied Psycholinguistics
- Language Teaching Research
- Phonology
- Journal of Neurolinguistics
- Journal of Second Language Writing
- English Today
- Poetics
- TESOL Quarterly
- Journal of Linguistics
- Journal of English for Academic Purposes
- International Journal of Bilingualism
- English for Specific Purposes
- International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
- Journal of Sociolinguistics
- Cognitive Linguistics
- Language and Speech
- Humor-International Journal of Humor Research
- Literary and Linguistic Computing
- Foreign Language Annals
- International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
- Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
- Language in Society
- World Englishes
- International Journal of Applied Linguistics
- Language Policy
- International Journal of Multilingualism
- Canadian Modern Language Review
- Pragmatics & beyond. New series
- Regional Language Centre Journal
- Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development
- English Journal
- Studies in the Novel
- English World-Wide
- Nordic Journal of English Studies
- Language Awareness
- Journal of English Linguistics
- English Language and Linguistics
- College English
- European Journal of English Studies
- TESOL Journal
- Changing English
- Shakespeare Quarterly
- English in Education
- English Studies
- Journal of Modern Literature
- English in Australia
- English Literary History
However, there are some potential problems with this list that someone noticed last year. Another problem that I noticed was that for each of the 3 subcategories, Google only showed the top 20 results. For example, Language & Linguistics only goes down to a h5-median of 25, while English Language & Literature goes all the way down to 7. So this is not a "Top 55" list because a lot of Language & Linguistics journals are missing.
And just as another point of comparison, there are other rankings as well, such as the Language & Linguistics category in the SCImago Journal & Country Rank website.
In spite of the problems, it's an interesting attempt to rank journals automatically and makes for a fun one-time snapshot (in my opinion). Hopefully Google will continue to improve Google Scholar and these metrics reports.
