The EAHN ranked journals project aims to develop a reliable tool which will help both institutions and individual scholars orient themselves within the maze of periodical publications in architectural history.
Photograph: Reto Geiser

A Ranked List of Journals: Reconfiguring Assessment in the Field

As many members of EAHN will be aware of, European universities are increasingly assessing their faculty by examining research output. Research Assessment Exercises as conducted in the United Kingdom might not yet be omnipresent, but in many countries one can definitely see a tendency to head in that direction. When universities and regulating bodies develop a research assessment system, they often base themselves on what are seen as commonly accepted parameters in the sciences and life sciences. In these disciplines, books are not regarded as particularly important, and exhibition catalogues are unheard of. Major publications in these fields are articles in reviewed journals with high ranking and high impact factors. The ranking of journals and the calculation of their impact factor is generally done by relying upon the ISI Web of Science, which offers such services through its SCI (Science Citation Index), SSCI (Social Science Citation Index) and AHCI (Arts & Humanities Citation Index). Unfortunately, the AHCI is far less comprehensive and serviceable than the other two citation indexes. Books are not excerpted in AHCI and many important journals never made it into their list of titles. AHCI is therefore not a good basis for assessing the research output of architectural historians. Nevertheless many universities seem to be inclined to use the AHCI– basically for reasons of simplicity of procedure and for lack of an alternative system.

The humanities in general and architectural history in particular thus increasingly feel the pressure to develop a system of their own that would offer guidelines in assessing the research output of scholars. For the moment no such system is available, although initiatives are being taken by several bodies (among them the European Science Foundation). Such a system should be able to acknowledge the value of books and exhibition catalogues, next to articles published in international journals. The EAHN wants to play a role in these developments. As a first step, we plan to produce a ranked list of journals relevant for architectural history and conservation, and to this end formed a subcommittee during the EAHN annual business meeting in Ankara. The subcommittee aims to prepare a ranked list of international journals to be approved during the 2010 EAHN  conference in Guimarães, Portugal. A tentative draft list of journals is now available on the EAHN Website. 

Initial members of the subcommittee established in Ankara are Hilde Heynen, Maristella Casciato, Elvan Altan Ergut and Cana Bilsel. We warmly invite other EAHN members to join this subcommittee in order to have a more extensive coverage of countries and languages. Scholars from Germany, Spain, Portugal, Greece, the UK and eastern Europe are especially encouraged to join us. Work will be conducted through e-mail exchanges, Skype conference calls and one intermediate meeting coinciding with the EAHN business meeting of January 2010. If you are interested in volunteering for this subcommittee, please contact hilde.heynen@asro.kuleuven.be.

Hilde Heynen