Where Do Nonprofit and Civil Society Researchers Publish? Perceptions of Nonprofit Journal Quality

Abstract

The field of nonprofit and civil society studies has seen tremendous growth in the past few decades and scholarly journals have played a central role for this growth by facilitating circulation of research in the academic community. To date, only three nonprofit journals have an impact factor and are indexed in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). However, there are several other journals serving the nonprofit and civil society academic community that do not appear in the SSCI. Thus, focusing solely on impact factors is unfeasible for creating rankings or to assess journal quality, as doing so fails to capture these other outlets. Seeking to surmount some of the shortcomings of relying merely on impact factors, this exploratory study uses survey data collected from nonprofit and civil society researchers in the United States and Europe to capture which journals they perceive to be quality outlets in the field. Findings show that impact factor is not necessarily the most common indicator for journal quality, instead newer outlets without impact factor are also perceived as potential viable outlets for publications with (at least) second tier if not top tier quality rating.