A critical evaluation of expert survey†based journal rankings: The role of personal research interests

By using the data from two recent survey†based rankings of knowledge management / intellectual capital and eHealth journals, this study tests the impact of personal research interests of journal raters on their ranking scores. The rationale is that raters assign higher scores to journals that cater to their area of expertise because they are more familiar with them. The results indicate the existence of raters’ bias toward the journals focusing on their preferred areas of interest, but this bias does not uniformly apply across all research topics. In some subdomains, such as intellectual capital, this bias may be very strong, whereas in others, such as soft†side knowledge management research, it may be nonexistent. Although management eHealth researchers rate management†focused journals higher than their clinical†centered counterparts, this bias does not exist among scholars favoring clinical topics. While this limitation is not fatal, the results from expert†survey journal ranking studies should be interpreted with caution.