Authors' Response to Reviews
| Author | James C. Garand,André Blais,Iain McLean,Micheal Giles |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1478-9299.2008.00174.x |
| Published date | 01 January 2009 |
| Date | 01 January 2009 |
Authors’ Response to Reviews
Iain McLean
University of Oxford
André Blais
Université de Montréal
James C. Garand
Louisiana State University
Micheal Giles
Emory University
We thank Political Studies Review for organising this symposium.Three of the four discus-
sants have been involved at senior levels in the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE),
and the fourth with the Australian equivalent.We thank them for their insights on the
policy issues as well as the political science.
Ron Johnston (2009) accuses us of‘quantifying the unquantifiable’;queries our impact
score;and says we are‘over-optimistic’in interpreting the r2values we report. If social
scientists succeed in quantifying something which is difficult to quantify they deserve praise,
not criticism, which is due only if they quantify something that is literally impossible to
quantify, or offer spurious precision in observations of noisy data.
Is journal quality unquantifiable? No.The ISI database generates a noisy signal. So does its
newer rival,Scopus. So does Google Scholar, as an unobtrusive by-product of a tool
designed for a different purpose. On books,which enter our analysis only indirectly,a noisy
signal of quality is generated by the number of academic libraries that buy them (White
et al., 2008;for a paper using our methodology to rank academic publishers,see Goodson
et al., 1999).We offer another,admittedly noisy, signal:the evaluations of political science
journals by those best qualified to evaluate them,namely academic political scientists in
PhD-awarding university departments. Some of the noise in these rival signals may cancel
out, getting us closer to the unknowable‘true’ quality of each journal.
Furthermore, as all the discussants note,the quality of political science research is regularly
judged by policy makers in the UK,Australia and numerous other countries.The results are
used to dole out scarce resources.This is not going to cease happening;but, as the discussants
note,there is a current dispute between proponents of peer review and of metric-based
methods, with some protagonists maintaining that the latter are not appropriate in political
science.However, a simple calculation of the number of items to be read and the number
of person hours available for reading shows that peer reviewers must be using (possibly
informal, possibly idiosyncratic) metrics if they are to do the job in the time available.Our
article offers one more possible tool to assist them.
Johnston criticises our ‘impact’measure as arbitrary.The measure was introduced by Garand
(1990) as a summary number to embody both the familiarity and the perceived quality of
each journal, and it has been used since then in the series of studies of which ours is one.
As Johnston notes (2009,p.53), Garand wrote in his 1990 paper:‘In measuring journal
impact it is necessary to weight the evaluation indicator by the familiarity measure’
(Johnston’s emphasis),and goes on to explain that a simple product of the two was
POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW: 2009VOL 7, 88–92
© 2009The Authors. Journal compilation © 2009 Political StudiesAssociation
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