  Rankings of scholarly journals based on citation data are often met with
skepticism by the scientific community. Part of the skepticism is due to
disparity between the common perception of journals' prestige and their ranking
based on citation counts. A more serious concern is the inappropriate use of
journal rankings to evaluate the scientific influence of authors. This paper
focuses on analysis of the table of cross-citations among a selection of
Statistics journals. Data are collected from the Web of Science database
published by Thomson Reuters. Our results suggest that modelling the exchange
of citations between journals is useful to highlight the most prestigious
journals, but also that journal citation data are characterized by considerable
heterogeneity, which needs to be properly summarized. Inferential conclusions
require care in order to avoid potential over-interpretation of insignificant
differences between journal ratings. Comparison with published ratings of
institutions from the UK's Research Assessment Exercise shows strong
correlation at aggregate level between assessed research quality and journal
citation `export scores' within the discipline of Statistics.
