Enriching Our Understanding of Health Care Management Journals: A Career Value and Cognitive Mapping Approach

摘要

Health management-related journals embody the place where scholarly and professional knowledge resides. Stakeholders—academicians, universities, libraries, and publishers—harbor interest in journal evaluations such as ratings and rankings in order to make sense of these journals. Although acceptance rates and impact factors enjoy wide consensus validity and are used as evaluative measures of journal prestige, they do not provide insights into journal focus or substantive orientation. An alternative cognitive mapping approach to ascertain how health care management journals are perceived with a new assessment criterion, Career value to an author by publishing in a journal, is introduced. The data were analyzed by multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analyses, resulting in a two-dimensional, nine cluster map. Nine clusters of perceptually related journals were ordered according to perceived career value. The presented map and clusters offer a complementary framework for comprehending how journals are understood by health management scholars.