Starting Point for the Selection of Ratings
The selection of ratings is based on the internationally recognized list compiled by Anne-Wil Harzing. As of Dec. 2025, this list includes nine journal ratings relevant to Business Administration and covers 842 journals.
Focus on Core Business Administration Disciplines
From this initial list, we first selected those journals that, according to the Harzing list, belong to the categories Entrepreneurship; Finance & Accounting; General & Strategy; International Business; Innovation; Marketing; Management Information Systems; Knowledge Management; Organizational Behavior/Studies; Human Resource Management; Industrial Relations; Operations Research; Management Science; Production & Operations Management; and Public Sector Management.
The objective of this procedure was to create a positive list of journals that are internationally recognized as belonging to the core domains of Business Administration.
To this list, we added all journals that are classified in the categories A+ to C in JOURQUAL 3.0. This step was intended to ensure that no journal from the core field of Business Administration would be omitted (i.e., to minimize Type II errors). JOURQUAL 3.0 provides a unique basis for this purpose because more than 1,100 business scholars were explicitly asked to identify the journals that are relevant to their respective fields. All journals receiving more than 25 nominations were included in JOURQUAL 3.0.
For the purposes of the meta-rating, only journals in the JOURQUAL 3.0 categories A+ to C were considered. We assumed that journals below this quality threshold would not have been included in the final meta-rating comprising 350 journals in any case (see below).
The resulting list contains 631 journals.
Selection of Frequently Rated Journals
In the next step, we selected journals that are included in at least five of the nine ratings. The rationale was again to ensure that the meta-rating focuses on the core set of the most important journals in Business Administration.
The underlying assumption is that the absence of a journal from a rating also constitutes relevant information. A journal may be positioned at the periphery of the Business Administration field and therefore may not have achieved broad recognition as a business journal. Alternatively, it may not be considered sufficiently important by the institutions producing the ratings to warrant inclusion.
Applying this criterion resulted in a final set of 514 journals.
Tournaments for Journal Evaluation
The evaluation of journals follows a simple and transparent logic. Each of the nine ratings is treated as a separate tournament. The core idea of each tournament is to compare every Journal X with any other Journal Y (X≠Y) included in the same rating and to award points whenever Journal X is ranked higher than or equal to Journal Y. Thus, only ordinal information is used.
If Journal X is ranked higher than Journal Y, Journal X receives two points. If both journals are assigned to the same rating category, Journal X receives one point. If Journal X is ranked lower than Journal Y, it receives no points. Journal X is compared with all other journals in the rating, and its points are summed across all pairwise comparisons.
This procedure accounts for the fact that the ratings differ in their degree of selectivity, meaning that their categories contain different numbers of journals. For example, with a total of 514 journals, if the highest category in a rating contains only 10 journals, journals in that category receive more points (9 points from ties plus 1,008 points from wins = 1,017 points) than if the highest category contains 30 journals (29 points from ties plus 968 points from wins = 997 points).
It should also be noted that the ratings differ substantially in the number of journals they include. Some ratings are essentially positive lists that contain only a limited set of journals. If the ratings were used in their original form, journals could earn different maximum numbers of points, making scores incomparable across tournaments. To address this issue, all ratings are expanded so that each tournament contains the same number of participants. We assume that the exclusion of a journal from a rating conveys information about its perceived quality or relevance, at least within certain limits. Journals not included in a particular rating are therefore assigned to an additional lowest category, against which all included journals automatically win.
To avoid imposing an excessively severe penalty on journals that are not included in a given rating, the subsequent aggregation across tournaments considers only those tournaments in which a journal actually participated.
Aggregation and Classification into Categories
In the next step, the average score achieved by each of the 514 journals across all tournaments was calculated. This produced an overall ranking of journals based on their aggregate performance. For each journal, the total number of points earned across all tournaments was divided by the number of ratings in which the journal was included, yielding an average score.
In the final step, the ranking was truncated after 350 positions, as the objective of the meta-rating was to identify the leading journals in Business Administration. These 350 journals were then assigned to rating categories. The size of the categories was based on JOURQUAL 3.0 and, like the overall methodology, was determined before the analysis was conducted.
The categories comprise:
- 25 journals in category A+,
- 75 journals in category A, and
- 250 journals in category B.
If two or more journals had obtained identical average scores at the boundary between two categories, all tied journals would have been assigned to the higher category. However, this situation did not occur.
The resulting list constitutes the final International Meta-Rating.