It’s 2014 and time for an annual review of the religion-related articles in the top journals in sociology. As I have done in the past, I use the ISI Web of Knowledge Journal Citation Reports to create the ranking of all sociology journals ranked by last year’s Impact Factor. In this review I noticed that 2012 was an anomalous year; last year I only needed to review the first 10 journals to get my top 11; this year I had to search down to the first 19. Even the newly discovered European Sociological Review had only 2 articles on religion compared to 5 in the previous year. I skipped two journals (noted below) that I had not heard of in any paper or book I have read in the past year in mainstream sociology. Interestingly some journals have gotten a much lower impact factor rating while others that were low last year have gotten a boost. A few remain constant and it’s those that many scholars view as consistently prestigious. Below I include a marker “tie” for those that appear in the same journal in the same year. It’s the journal rank that counts so those articles should be more or less ranked about the same. That said, 7 of the first 19 journals with the highest impact factor contained 11 articles related to religion. As of this writing the December issues of the American Journal of Sociology and Sociological Theory were not available so it’s possible that these rankings will miss important articles here. Hat tip to all those listed for their contributions!
[apologies to the second author, I don’t know where the umlaut symbol is and how to work it.]
Annals of Tourism Research: skipped
Social Networks: 0
Sociological Methodology: 0
Journal of Marriage and Family: 0
Journal of Consumer Culture: 0
Sociological Theory: 0
Population and Development Review: 0
Socio-Economic Review: 0
[this article might also be awarded the “longest title of the year”]
Cornell Hospitality Quarterly: skipped
Sociological Methods and Research: 0
Politics and Society: 0
Law and Society Review: 0