ABDC and ABS Journal Rankings

There is obviously a lot of controversy around journal rankings – especially for more specialised subject areas (such as social marketing, see this post). Despite the issues, I think taken with a pinch of salt, they can give an indication of the quality of the articles contained in the journal – although of course, they are by no means a hard and fast rule.Remember: journal rankings are a guide - not gospel Click To Tweet

One particular problem I had with the ABS List (apart from some rankings I really fail to understand) is that it is massively restricted in terms of the journals it contains, for example, health journals (which may be relevant for social marketers) are vastly underrepresented.
An alternative to the British ABS list for me has always been the Australian ABDC List: It has far more journals on it than the ABS list. It also has some interesting discrepancies (e.g. Marketing Intelligence and Planning is a very good A on the ABCD List – and a very meagre 1 on the ABS List, EJM makes top spot on the ABCD List with a A*, but is “only” a 3 on the ABS, while Journal of Consumer Psychology gets top marks 4* from ABS, but “only” A from ABS).The ABDC List is much more inclusive than the restrictive ABS List Click To Tweet

Apart from those differences, I found having a combined list useful, just to have an overlook over the different outlets that are available. For that purpose, I combined the two lists into a single spreadsheet, making it easy to find and order the journals. I’m attaching the file here in the hope that it is useful (and if you spot a mistake, let me know… especially as I found ABS is difficult to ‘bulk search’).

Download the .XLS file here

Of course,… if you are more interested to delve deeper into all the figures behind the rankings – there is always the truly amazing and complete list of list compiled by Anne-Will Harzing available from here, which contains 18 different rankings of more than 900 journals!