Beyond 'Channel Registers' Ways and Aberrations of Ranking International Academic Book Publishers

Abstract

Ranking of academic institutions and of publications is on everyone's lips these days. The English-language Wikipedia article on "Ranking of Academic Publishers" was accessed no less than 66046 times last year.

All too many academics and science policy-makers around the world are still unaware of the market distortions that are unleashed on the world market of ideas by such ranking systems, which are based on purely subjective criteria by a powerful science bureaucracy that manages and distributes scientific resources, as in the case of Norway and its "channel register" of the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills. Similar systems are also used in Denmark, Finland, Flanders, Lithuania, Sweden and South Africa.

The advance of such "channel registers" means that the publications of the scientific community are evaluated according to points for the funding allocated by the state to the scientific institutes, but also for the further career opportunities of the scientists. A first and really hard test for such systems as the "channel register" is to ask how those who have done everything right in the social science community that there is to do right, namely the Nobel laureates in economics and the Skytte laureates in political science, would have fared in terms of the evaluation of their publications according to the "channel register". Our sobering finding for the last five years is: in their publishing behaviour, they have demonstrably been most successful in reaching world markets with publishing companies, the majority of which (52%) were not even rated at the best level "2" in the "Channel Register".

10 of the 16 laureates in the social sciences in the past five years published deficiently according to the criteria of the Norwegian "Channel Register"; namely:

1. Joshua D. Angrist
2. Guido W. Imbens
3 Margaret Levi
4 Abhijit Banerjee
5 Esther Duflo
6. Michael Kremer
7 Jane Mansbridge
8. William D. Nordhaus
9. Paul R. Romer
10 Richard H. Thaler

Our alternative and empirical analysis of 100 leading publishers in the world is based on the following variables:

• Google Scholar presence according to the CERES Institute at Erasmus University Rotterdam
• Presence in the Open Syllabus system
• OCLC WorldCat presence > 50 libraries (% of total 2010-2023)
• OCLC WorldCat presence > 500 libraries (% of total production 2010-2023)

Our calculation method for ranking the 100 publishers is based on a so-called non-parametric index modelled on the United Nations Human Development Index.

In our ranking, Oxford University Press leads ahead of John Wiley, Cambridge University Press, Quorum Books and MIT Press. Ranked further down is the performance of Palgrave Macmillan, a very popular publishing company especially in the political science community, which is ranked not far ahead of Cambridge Scholars Publishers and Nova Science Publishers. It is strongly emphasised on the part of the author that all the publishing companies surveyed have done an excellent job and that our ranking is merely an indicator of which companies are really leading in the world markets.

We also consider some implications for the field of political science, where the 62 major political science publishers we surveyed represented no less than 31% of the total supply. It is clear that Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Peter Lang, Sage Publications, Nova Science Publishers, Princeton University Press, John Wiley and Cornell University Press are the leading publishing companies in the field of political science worldwide. Finally, we also show how benchmarks can be formed for the assessment of publishing companies that have not yet been included in our comparison. For the companies with their corporate headquarters in continental Europe, our comparison shows that - presumably due to the still deficient distribution systems on the North American continent - there is still a certain deficit in the degree of distribution especially in the North American markets.

Keywords: Bibliometrics, OCLC Worldcat, CERES, Erasmus University, Open Syllabus, Google Scholar, Ranking of publishing companies

JEL Classification: F6, Y8, Z1