There are a number of approaches to ranking

academic publishing Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes Research, academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or Thesis, theses. The part of academic written output that is n ...

groups and publishers. Rankings rely on subjective impressions by the scholarly community, on analyses of prize winners of scientific associations, discipline, a publisher's reputation, and its

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a type of journal ranking. Journals with higher impact factor values are considered more prestigious or important within their field. The Impact Factor of a journa ...

(particularly in the sciences).

Ranking challenges

Publications are often judged by venue, rather than merit. This has been criticized in the Leiden Manifesto and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. According to the manifesto, "Science and technology indicators are prone to conceptual ambiguity and uncertainty and require strong assumptions that are not universally accepted. The meaning of citation counts, for example, has long been debated. Thus, best practice uses multiple indicators to provide a more robust and pluralistic picture." Moreover, studies of methodological quality and reliability have found that "reliability of published research works in several fields may be decreasing with increasing journal rank", contrary to widespread expectations. In a study assessing an increasingly-diversified array of publishers and their service to the academic community, Janice S. Lewis concluded that college and university librarians ranked university presses higher and commercial publishers lower than did members of the American Political Science Association. According to Colin Steele, a librarian at the Australian National Library in

Canberra Canberra ( ; ) is the capital city of Australia. Founded following the Federation of Australia, federation of the colonies of Australia as the seat of government for the new nation, it is Australia's list of cities in Australia, largest in ...

, "Listings of publishers by title also fail to take into account that some university presses are strong in certain disciplines, but not across the whole spectrum." Rankings can vary widely by discipline.

Australian Political Science rankings

The Australian Political Studies Association (APSA) ranked academic publishers in 2007, taking into consideration both book and journal publication. By 2022 this was replaced by a ranking of journal titles only. In 2007, their top-ranked (A+) publishers were: *

Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press was the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted a letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it was the oldest university press in the world. Cambridge University Press merged with Cambridge Assessme ...

University of Chicago Press The University of Chicago Press is the university press of the University of Chicago, a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. It is the largest and one of the oldest university presses in the United States. It pu ...

Columbia University Press Columbia University Press is a university press based in New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's la ...

* Harvard University Press *

MIT Press The MIT Press is the university press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The MIT Press publishes a number of academic journals and has been a pioneer in the Open Ac ...

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books ...

/Clarendon (UK/US) *

Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financial ...

* Stanford University Press *

University of California Press The University of California Press, otherwise known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish scholarly and scientific works by faculty ...

Yale University Press Yale University Press is the university press of Yale University. It was founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day and Clarence Day, grandsons of Benjamin Day, and became a department of Yale University in 1961, but it remains financially and ope ...

In 2007, their second-ranked (A) publishers were: * Alfred A. Knopf *

Allen & Unwin George Allen & Unwin was a British publishing company formed in 1911 when Sir Stanley Unwin purchased a controlling interest in George Allen & Co. It became one of the leading publishers of the twentieth century and established an Australian ...

Cornell University Press The Cornell University Press is the university press of Cornell University, an Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York. It is currently housed in Sage House, the former residence of Henry William Sage. It was first established in 1869, maki ...

Duke University Press Duke University Press is an academic publisher and university press affiliated with Duke University. It was founded in 1921 by William T. Laprade as The Trinity College Press. (Duke University was initially called Trinity College). In 1926 ...

Edward Elgar Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, (; 2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestr ...

* Elsevier Science Ltd * IPA, Warsaw *

Johns Hopkins University Press Johns Hopkins University Press (also referred to as JHU Press or JHUP) is the publishing division of Johns Hopkins University. It was founded in 1878 and is the oldest continuously running university press in the United States. The press publi ...

* Kluwer *

Manchester University Press Manchester University Press is the university press of the University of Manchester, England, and a publisher of academic books and journals. Manchester University Press has developed into an international publisher. It maintains its links with t ...

* Melbourne University Press * New York University Press *

Palgrave MacMillan Palgrave Macmillan is a British academic and trade publishing company headquartered in the London Borough of Camden. Its programme includes textbooks, journals, monographs, professional and reference works in print and online. It maintains offi ...

(UK and Australia, St. Martin's Press in US) * Politico's * Polity Press *

Routledge Routledge ( ) is a British multinational corporation, multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, academic journals, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanit ...

( Taylor and Francis) *

Sage Publishing Sage Publishing, formerly SAGE Publications, is an American Independent business, independent Academic publishing, academic publishing company, founded in 1965 in New York City by Sara Miller McCune and now based in the Newbury Park, California, ...

* Science Publishers * Univ. of Pennsylvania Press *

University of Michigan Press The University of Michigan Press is a university press that is a part of Michigan Publishing at the University of Michigan Library. It publishes 170 new titles each year in the humanities and social sciences. Titles from the press have earn ...

* University of Minnesota Press * University of New South Wales Press * University of Toronto Press * WHO/EDM, Geneva *

Wiley-Blackwell Wiley-Blackwell is an international scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons. It was formed by the merger of John Wiley & Sons Global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business with Blackwell Publish ...

* AP, London *

Basic Books Basic Books is a book publisher founded in 1950 and located in New York City, now an imprint of Hachette Book Group. It publishes books in the fields of psychology, philosophy, economics, science, politics, sociology, current affairs, and his ...

, New York * Blackwell, Oxford *

Clarendon Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books ...

, Gloucestershire, UK * CRC, Ghent, Belgium * CRC, New York * Harper & Row, New York *

John Wiley & Sons John Wiley & Sons, Inc., commonly known as Wiley (), is an American Multinational corporation, multinational Publishing, publishing company that focuses on academic publishing and instructional materials. The company was founded in 1807 and pr ...

, West Sussex, UK * Pergamon Press, Oxford/Amsterdam *

Prentice Hall Prentice Hall was a major American publishing#Textbook_publishing, educational publisher. It published print and digital content for the 6–12 and higher-education market. It was an independent company throughout the bulk of the twentieth cen ...

, Eaglewood Cliffs (NJ), US *

Random House Random House is an imprint and publishing group of Penguin Random House. Founded in 1927 by businessmen Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer as an imprint of Modern Library, it quickly overtook Modern Library as the parent imprint. Over the foll ...

, New York *

Springer Springer or springers may refer to: Publishers * Springer Science+Business Media, aka Springer International Publishing, a worldwide publishing group founded in 1842 in Germany formerly known as Springer-Verlag. ** Springer Nature, a multinationa ...

, London/Berlin

SENSE rankings

The Research School for Socio-Economic and Natural Sciences of the Environment (SENSE Research School) has ranked scientific publishers every year from 2006 until 2022. This ranking was intended for internal use only and is not anymore available.

Spanish National Research Council rankings

In 2012 and 2014, the Spanish National Research Council asked 11,864 Spanish academics to name the 10 most prestigious academic publishers from over 600 international and 500 Spanish-language publishers. It received 2,731 responses, a response rate of 23.05 percent. Results were compiled using a weighted average.http://ilia.cchs.csic.es/SPI/metodologia_2014.html and http://ilia.cchs.csic.es/SPI/prestigio_expertos_2014.php The results were: #

Springer Nature Springer Nature or the Springer Nature Group is a German-British academic publishing company created by the May 2015 merger of Springer Science+Business Media and Holtzbrinck Publishing Group's Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, and Macm ...

Elsevier Elsevier ( ) is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''The Lancet'', ''Cell (journal), Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, ...

# Peter Lang #

Thomson Reuters Thomson Reuters Corporation ( ) is a Canadian multinational corporation, multinational content-driven technology Conglomerate (company), conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and maintains its headquarters at 1 ...

# Blackwell # De Gruyter #

McGraw Hill McGraw Hill is an American education science company that provides educational content, software, and services for students and educators across various levels—from K-12 to higher education and professional settings. They produce textbooks, ...

# IGI Global

Granada rankings

To quantitatively assess the output of a publishing company, in 2014 a research group associated with the University of Granada created a methodology based on the Thomson-Reuters Book Citation Index. The quantitative weight of the publishers is based on output data, impact (citations) and publisher profile. According to the Granada study, the 10 leading companies were: #

Palgrave Macmillan Palgrave Macmillan is a British academic and trade publishing company headquartered in the London Borough of Camden. Its programme includes textbooks, journals, monographs, professional and reference works in print and online. It maintains offi ...

# Nova Science Publishers #

# Information Age Publishing #

# IGI Global

Libcitation rankings

The Research Impact Measurement Service (RIMS) at the University of New South Wales presented a quantitative methodology of bibliometric comparisons of book publishers. In a '' Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology'' article, Howard D. White et al. wrote: "Bibliometric measures for evaluating research units in the book-oriented humanities and social sciences are underdeveloped relative to those available for journal-oriented science and technology". The RIMS proposed what they called a "libcitation count", counting the libraries holding a given book as reported in a national (or international) union catalog. In the follow-up literature, comparing research units or even the output of publishing companies became the target of research. *Zuccala, A., Guns, R., Cornacchia, R., & Bod, R. (2014). Can we rank scholarly book publishers? A bibliometric experiment with the field of history. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology White et al. wrote, Libcitations, according to the RIMS, reflect what librarians know about the prestige of publishers, the opinions of reviewers, and the reputations of authors.

References

* Amsler, S. S., & Bolsmann, C. (2012). University ranking as social exclusion. British journal of sociology of education, 33(2), 283–301. * Andrés, A. (2009). Measuring academic research: how to undertake a bibliometric study. Oxford: Chandos Publishing. * Bornmann, L., Mutz, R., & Daniel, H. D. (2013). Multilevel‐statistical reformulation of citation‐based university rankings: The Leiden ranking 2011/2012. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64(8), 1649–1658. * Braun, Tibor et al. (1985). Scientometric indicators: a 32 country comparative evaluation of publishing performance and citation impact. Singapore; Philadelphia: World Scientific. * Dill, D. D., & Soo, M. (2005). Academic quality, league tables, and public policy: A cross-national analysis of university ranking systems. Higher Education, 49(4), 495–533. * Donohue, Joseph C. (1974). Understanding scientific literatures: a bibliometric approach. Cambridge, MIT Press. * Drummond, R., & Wartho, R. (2009). RIMS: the research impact measurement service at the University of New South Wales. Australian Academic & Research Libraries, * Herb, U., Kranz, E., Leidinger, T., & Mittelsdorf, B. (2010). How to assess the impact of an electronic document? And what does impact mean anyway? Reliable usage statistics in heterogeneous repository communities. OCLC Systems & Services: International digital library perspectives, 26(2), 133–145. * Hug, Sven E.; Ochsner, Michael; Daniel, Hans-Dieter. (2013). Criteria for assessing research quality in the humanities: a Delphi study among scholars of English literature, German literature and art history. Research Evaluation. Dec2013, Vol. 22 Issue 5, p369-383. * Kousha, K., Thelwall, M., & Rezaie, S. (2011). Assessing the citation impact of books: The role of Google Books, Google Scholar, and Scopus. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(11), 2147–2164. * Oltersdorf, J. (2013). Publikationen: Funktion und Repräsentation (Doctoral dissertation, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Philosophische Fakultät I). * Rostaing, H., Boutin, E., & Mannina, B. (1999). Evaluation of internet resources: bibliometric techniques applications. cybermetrics, 99. * Sadlak, J., & Liu, N. C. (2007). The world-class university and ranking: Aiming beyond status. Bucharest, Romania/Shanghai, China/Cluj-Napoca, Romania: Unesco-Cepes. * Sahel, J. A. (2011). Quality versus quantity: assessing individual research performance. Science translational medicine, 3(84) * Sieber, J., & Gradmann, S. (2011). How to best assess monographs?. Humboldt University Berlin. * Tausch, A. (2011). On the Global Impact of Selected Social-Policy Publishers in More Than 100 Countries. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 42(4), 476–513. * Tausch, A. (2018). The Market Power of Global Scientific Publishing Companies in the Age of Globalization: An Analysis Based on the OCLC Worldcat (June 16, 2018). Journal of Globalization Studies, 9(2), 63–91. Also Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3197632 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3197632. * Tausch, A. (2022). Beyond 'Channel Registers' Ways and Aberrations of Ranking International Academic Book Publishers (September 18, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4222481 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4222481. * * Taylor, P., & Braddock, R. (2007). International university ranking systems and the idea of university excellence. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 29(3), * Thelwall, M., Klitkou, A., Verbeek, A., Stuart, D., & Vincent, C. (2010). Policy‐ relevant Webometrics for individual scientific fields. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(7), 1464–1475. * Torres-Salinas, D., Robinson-García, N., & López-Cózar, E. D. 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Higher Education in Europe, 32(1), 5–15. * Vinkler, Peter (2010). The evaluation of research by scientometric indicators. Oxford ngland: Chandos Publishing. * Waltman, L., & Schreiber, M. (2013). On the calculation of percentile‐based bibliometric indicators. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64(2), 372–379. * White, H. D.; Boell, Sebastian K.; Yu, H.; Davis, M.; Wilson, C. S.; Cole, Fletcher T.H. J. (2009) Libcitations: A measure for comparative assessment of book publications in the humanities and social sciences. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology. Jun2009, Vol. 60 Issue 6, p1083-1096. * Zuccala, A. A., & White, H. D. (2015). Correlating Libcitations and Citations in the Humanities with WorldCat and Scopus Data. In A. A. Salah, Y. Tonta, A. A. Akdag Salah, C. Sugimoto, & U. Al (Eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI), Istanbul, Turkey, 29 June to 4 July 2015. (pp. 305–316). Bogazici University. * Zuccala, A., & Guns, R. (2013). Comparing book citations in humanities journals to library holdings: Scholarly use versus perceived cultural benefit. In 14th international conference of the international society for scientometrics and informetrics (pp. 353–360). * Zuccala, A., Guns, R., Cornacchia, R., & Bod, R. (2014). Can we rank scholarly book publishers? A bibliometric experiment with the field of history. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. * Zuccala, A., Someren, M., & Bellen, M. (2014). A machine‐learning approach to coding book reviews as quality indicators: Toward a theory of megacitation. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(11), 2248–2260.

External links

Scilit
rankings of journals and publishers, automated by MDPI {{Authority control Academic publishing companies * Library science University and college rankings