2018 Impact Factors of SCM Journals

Claviate Analytics have recently published their newest InCites Journal Citation Reports. It is great to see that the 2018 impact factors of all but one journals related to supply chain management have increased again, which highlights the rapidly growing relevance of our discipline. Two journals have an impact factor larger than 7: Journal of Operations Management (7.776; +2.9) and Journal of Supply Chain Management (7.125; +1.0). With an impact factor larger than 5, International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management (5.212; +1.0) has now arrived in the first league of management journals. Other SCM-related journals with high impact factors are: Supply Chain Management: An International Journal (4.296; +0.5), Management Science (4.219; +0.7), International Journal of Operations & Production Management (4.111; +1.2), Journal of Business Logistics (3.171; +0.3) and Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management (3.089; −0.6). But there are even more SCM journals with an impact factor around 2: Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (2.667; +0.9), Operations Research (2.604; +0.3), International Journal of Logistics Management (2.226; +0.5), Production and Operations Management (2.171; +0.4) and Decision Sciences (1.960; +0.3). Although the impact factor is certainly an imperfect proxy of a journal’s quality, I can only hope that rather conservative qualitative rankings, such as the ABS-AJG list, the UT Dallas list or the FT50 list, will finally be adapted to this new reality. This step is urgently needed!