Purpose

The purpose of the journal list is to specify “A level” publication outlets for the department faculty to be used in research assessments, including annual reviews and promotion and tenure decisions. This is a more complicated endeavor than for some other business school departments due to the very diverse research areas that are represented in the Business Analytics department. The goal of the list is to provide each faculty member in the department with 4-5 “A level” outlets that are appropriate for their research. Given this goal, the list will be re-evaluated approximately every three years.

Methodology

The current list was obtained by considering faculty input and the following factors:

1. Financial Times and UT Dallas journal lists.
2. ISI Journal Citation Reports (JCR) ranking by Article Influence Score (AIS), within area. The AIS is a 5-year citation metric that is computed on a “per article” basis.
3. Google Scholar h5 ranking within area. These are “top 20” citation rankings that are not normalized for the number of articles, so they represent the influence of the journal rather than the influence of individual articles.
4. A “consensus” ranking computed using the Harzing Journal Quality List (JQL), within area. The JQL gives reputational scores for business journals from several sources, which are all on different scales. To obtain a “consensus” score, each individual score was first converted to 5-point scale using the table below, and then the average of the converted scores was used to rank the journals.

The current "A" journal list is:

Decision Support Systems
European Journal of Operational Research
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Information Systems Research
INFORMS J Computing
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
Journal of Machine Learning Research
Journal of Management Information Systems
Journal of Operations Management
Journal of the American Statistical Association
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B
Management Science
Manufacturing and Service Operations Management
Mathematical Programming
MIS Quarterly
Operations Research
Production and Operations Management
SIAM Journal on Optimization
Transportation Science

Conferences

Departmental faculty regularly submit papers to refereed conferences, which are included in the Google Scholar h5 rankings. A small number of these conferences are sufficiently elite to be regarded as “A” publication outlets. The list of “A” conferences consists of:

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
Web Conference (WWW)

Other journals/conferences

There are other journals that would be considered “A” given the criteria described above, but are not included here because they do not match with our vision of the field.

Under certain circumstances, additional journals that are not on this list may also be considered to be A-level journals if there are considered high quality in another field. For example, if a Business Analytics faculty member co-authors a paper with a faculty member in Finance, and that paper appears in an A-level Finance journal, then the publication would also be considered to be an A-level publication for the faculty member in Business Analytics.