Editorial team scholarly index (ETSI): an alternative indicator for evaluating academic journal reputation

Evaluating the scholarly reputation of journals has become one of the key concerns and research focuses in academia. The scholarly performance of a journal’s editorial team helps to enhance the journal’s academic impact. This paper develops an editorial team scholarly index from the new perspective of journal editorship, combining the editors’ scholarly performance and the editors’ titles (e.g., associate, assistant) to provide an alternative indicator for evaluating academic journal reputation. This index is useful to measure and rank journals, especially new journals. The paper classifies journal editorial teams and evaluates academic journals using data for 738 members of editorial teams for 21 well-known journals in the field of library and information science. The study concludes that the new index has a significantly positive relationship with journal reputation and shows that the journals’ rankings according to the new index are neither far away from nor uselessly close to the four baseline indicators traditionally measuring journal reputation. Finally, the research finds that there are significant positive correlations between journal reputation and the new index when three different levels of titles of editors are considered, and a comparative empirical analysis of the title levels is provided.