According to Fawcett et al. (1995), academic journals are the primary platform for developing and disseminating disciplinary knowledge. We therefore suggest that monitoring the relative performance and quality of leading SCML academic journals is an important ongoing endeavor that helps the discipline track its progress in relation to other disciplines. Such research studies appear to influence the promotion and remuneration of SCML researchers and may also be critical for publishers whose sales may be contingent on perceived journal quality. Accordingly, we expect that evaluation studies for the SCML journals will continue. These research efforts will now be greatly facilitated by the ability to access the Web of Science database for data rather than performing manual counts.
Future studies could perform longitudinal analyses of journal performance on some or all of the Thomson Reuters criteria examined in this study. For example, after the SCML journals have been included in the Web of Science database for several years, this study could be repeated to determine the effects that inclusion in the database has had on journal citation rates, author and/or editor citation rates, and self-citation. Journal impact factors could also be tracked and compared with those from other business disciplines. Once all six journals have been in the database for more than two years, journal impact factors will begin to fulfill their true potential since citations from