Ranking Journals in the Humanities: An Australian Case Study

This article reviews the methods commonly used to evaluate journals, looking particularly at indicators relevant to journals in the humanities. It then applies these methods to a sample of Australian humanities journals. The indicators used are: level of holdings in large overseas academic libraries, coverage in international databases, standards of refereeing. peer evaluation by researchers, and frequency of citation in ISI source journals. The results obtained from each indicator are compared to establish the validity of the indicators.