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Accepted Paper:

New Hegemonic Strategies in Publication: Research Quality Evaluation and Corporate Journals  
Thomas Reuter (University of Melbourne)

Paper short abstract:

Many government have established systems for ranking journals in terms of their "impact on the field". We need to expose how such ranking systems increase hierarchy in an international publishing world that is already full of disparities, between the core and periphery of power/knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

Many government have now established systems for ranking all journals in terms of their "quality" or "impact on the field". This paper argues that the impact of such ranking systems is to maintain or extend hegemonies of knowledge. While the declared goal of the schemes is to measure "academic output" more realistically than is possible with purely quantitative measures, the result is that journals considered equal before, are now ranked, formally and permanently. While there usually has been consultation with academics, in Australia for example, the scope provided for criticizing the scheme was limited to the details of ranking. The risk is that this process will increase the degree of hierarchy in an international publishing world that is already full of disparities, between the core and periphery of power/knowledge, and between global and more local languages. If schemas of journal evaluation are shaped by the ethnocentrism of the globally dominant players, alternative cultural value-systems may be ignored and journals in marginal countries devalued. Another danger is that ranking can further marginalize different, alternative voices within our own culture, or within a shared global culture. Given that anthropology is a critical enterprise, we are particularly vulnerable to the kinds of punishments that now go along with publishing in'fringe' journals.

Panel P11
Publishing, prestige, and money in global anthropology (WCAA)
  Session 1