Impact factor: Best Instructional Design Journals

What are the best journals in the instructional design field? Well while I believe its a matter of preference, some have created something called the impact factor. Thomsom Reuters under the name Science Watch has created this impact factor for all fields. Now while they do not have instructional design as a field, they do have educational research and our journals are ranked in there. So I will simply give a list of our journals and show what they are ranked in the overall list and what their impact factor is.

First, here is how the impact factor is calculated:

“The 2009 impact factor is calculated by taking the number of all current citations to source items published in a journal over the previous two years and dividing by the number of articles published in the journal during the same period–in other words, a ratio between citations and recent citable items published. The rankings in the next two columns show impact over longer time spans, based on figures from Journal Performance Indicators.

In these columns, total citations to a journal’s published papers are divided by the total number of papers that the journal published, producing a citations-per-paper impact score over a five-year period (middle column) and a 29-year period (right-hand column). SOURCE: Journal Citations Report and Journal Performance Indicators.”

Journals Impact factor and Rank 2010:

2. Review of Educational Research (3.127)
3. Learning and Instruction (2.768)
5. Computers & Education (2.617)
11. BJET (2.139)
12. Metacognition and Learning (2.038)
22. Journal of Learning Sciences (1.7)
24. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology (1.6)
32. INSTRUCTIONAL SCIENCEĀ  (1.473)
51. ETRD (1.081)
52. EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY (1.066)
57. Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology (1.016)
58. Distance Education (1.0)
70. HARVARD EDUCATIONAL REVIEW (.841)
75. Journal of Science Education and Technology (.804)
113. JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL COMPUTING RESEARCH (.561)

Full list can be found here – Just a note about this link, I can only access it from my campus or when I am signed onto my school’s vpn. Thus you do need access from your school before viewing it.

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