Education journal rankings: A diversity-based Author Affiliation Index assessment methodology

Determining the reputation of academic journals is an crucial issue. The Author Affiliation Index (AAI) was proposed as a novel indicator for judging journal quality in many academic disciplines. Nevertheless, the original AAI has several potential limitations, some of which have been discussed and addressed in previous studies. In this paper, we modified the original AAI by incorporating diversity of top-notch institutions, namely the AAID, exploring how institutional diversity is related to journal quality assessment. We further conducted a quality assessment of 263 education journals indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) by applying the AAID, AAI and weighted AAI. We find that the AAID ranking possesses a low correlation coefficient with the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and Eigenfactor Score (ES). That is to say, the AAID rating has not reached a good agreement with the most popular ranking indicators JIF and ES for journals in the field of education. Moreover, we analyze the reasons for the highest AAID from the structure of complex networks. Overall, the AAID is an alternative indicator for evaluating the prestige of journals from a new perspective.