Talk:Men and Masculinities

Merge
This article and Men and Masculinities (journal) are duplicates and should be merged. DA Sonnenfeld (talk) 04:34, 28 April 2012 (UTC)
 * ✅ Thanks David. John Vandenberg (chat) 04:46, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

Impact factor and quartile
If you go to Web of Science, click on Journal Citation Reports, search for "Men and Masculinities" ("search for specific journal") in the "JRC Social Sciences Edition", then click on "MEN MASC" and "Journal Ranking", you'll get to a site that has the category name (Sociology), the total journals in the category (138), the journal rank in the category (68), and the quartile in the category (Q2). My addition wasn't original research. It gives the same information that anyone with access to the Web of Science can find on the JRC "Journal Ranking" page for the journal. The impact factor itself is probably just a meaningless figure for most readers. We should try to explain what an impact factor of 0.865 means in the relevant category. Is 0.865 good, is it bad, is the journal a joke or to be taken seriously? So I added the quartile to help readers understand that 0.865 in the 2013 ranking of sociology journals is above average. -- Sonic Y (talk) 19:10, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
 * , you're absolutely right. They didn't use to do this, but they recently changed their web interface and now give this info, so this is indeed not OR. I'm still not used to the new interface, I fear :-) I have changed the article, adding the exact ranking, which is clearer than "2nd quartile" (I bet more people know what an IF is than a "quartile"... :-). In general, I avoid putting more than an IF in an article. These data change yearly and it is each year a lot of work to update all our journal articles (which is why some still display 2008 IFs...) Including ranking info just makes that task harder. BTW, the journal is not above average (the aggregate IF over all journals in that category is 1.028), but above the median of 0.831 (which is what quartiles refer to). And at 68th out of 138 journals, it's only barely above the median, too... Anyway, hope the changes made are acceptable to you. --Randykitty (talk) 08:36, 30 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your reply. Your changes are good, thanks. I know that it's more work to update the category rank in addition to the impact factor but I'm convinced that many readers do not know what an IF of x.xxx means in a given category. I work in academia (although not in sociology) and I admit that before looking it up I couldn't have said with certainty if 0.865 translates to a 40-ish or 70-ish rank in the sociology category in 2013. Many readers just want to find out if a journal is respected in the field and it's probably better if we give the IF but also add that it was ranked 2nd or 68th or 137th out of 138 journals. -- Sonic Y (talk) 18:41, 30 May 2015 (UTC)