  Evaluating the quality of academic journal is becoming increasing important
within the context of research performance evaluation. Traditionally, journals
have been ranked by peer review lists such as that of the Association of
Business Schools (UK) or though their journal impact factor (JIF). However,
several new indicators have been developed, such as the h-index, SJR, SNIP and
the Eigenfactor which take into account different factors and therefore have
their own particular biases. In this paper we evaluate these metrics both
theoretically and also through an empirical study of a large set of business
and management journals. We show that even though the indicators appear highly
correlated in fact they lead to large differences in journal rankings. We
contextualize our results in terms of the UK's large scale research assessment
exercise (the RAE/REF) and particularly the ABS journal ranking list. We
conclude that no one indicator is superior but that the h-index (which includes
the productivity of a journal) and SNIP (which aims to normalize for field
effects) may be the most effective at the moment.
