A simple question: How relavant are academic journals these days? More specifically how relevant are academic journals to, say, management or leadership? I have never in my entire professional life ever heard anyone reference research from the Academy of Management for example. It seems that such journals are, for the most part, confined within the halls of academia. Thoughts?
I can't tell about all the fields but in IT are extremely relevant. Your wireless internet use technologies that were published in IEEE journals and so many technologies use today. Less developed countries have now access to high tech because of publications. Medicine and biotech also rely heavily on academic journals.
I'm thinking that top people read these journals to inform their decision making processes. They may not cite specific research in their conversation but that doesn't mean that they're not aware of that research.
Anyone who wants to stay abreast of the latest research in any particular field will want to read the related journals. That's the best way to stay current.
In scientific and engineering fields -- where technologies and practices actually are subject to rapid change -- academic journals are in fact read and cited. In most humanities and social science fields, academic research is much less likely to have a significant impact on real-world practices. So academic journals in such fields primarily serve as a vehicle for self-promotion by professors and graduate students. They can certainly have value in those respects -- but that's often the extent of their value. If that sounds like a harsh assessment, consider that one recent study found that 43% of all law review articles are never cited again after publication. Law profs put a lot of time and effort into writing law review articles because it looks good on their resumes and helps them get tenure -- not because law review articles are vital to keeping the legal community abreast of the latest legal developments. The same is true in the business and management community.
This is not the case with psychology, sociology and linguistics (three social science fields). All three of these fields rely heavily on academic journals to keep abreast of the latest research and as a vehicle to report their own findings.
But all three of these fields tend to represent the "science" part of "social science". The picture changes as you move towards the more "social" part, where you find disciplines like "business", "leadership", and "management". For example, the following opinion on business journals is from a 2005 paper by Bennis & O'Toole that was published in the Harvard Business Review (a leading business journal): That point of view obviously coincides with the Original Poster's observations.
a) Law Journals: I'm quite sure that if someone is a practitioner (judge, lawyer etc) in a fairly new law area (e.g. Information Technology), journals might come in quite handy as a reference. On the other hand I somewhat dislike law journals since thier articles seem to go on for at least over 50 pages in the top journals. b) Business: It might depend on the focus and orientation of the journal. Harvard Business Review or Sloan Management Review are clearly reaching far beyond the typical academic audience. But I can understand that some study relying on some classroom survey and a bit of statistic squeezing does very little to bring new management impulses.
I think the issue is that lately we have seen an increasing number of online journals that seem to be directed at academics that just need to publish in a peer reviewed journal to keep their job but actually there is little impact of these publications in the real world. Even UoP has its own journal. As academic jobs require publications, there is a tendency to create many online journals that add little value and have no other intention but to boost academics resumes. There are many journal rankings that classify them as A, B and C. I believe that even C journals might be of some value but there are hundreds if not thousands that have no classification because they opened only in the last couple of years. Many Universities only count journals that are classified in certain rankings while others use metrics such as impact factors. Internet has made the journal business really complex. Virtually, anyone can start a journal as all you need is a web site.
