Impact factor as a metric to assess journals where OM research is published

Highlights ► We conducted an exhaustive comparison of OM journal rankings based on impact factors versus other ranking methods (113 characters) ► Impact factors are useful metrics to rank OM journals (53 characters) ► Impact factor rankings alone are not a replacement for survey‐based, citation‐based, or author‐based methods (108 characters) ► Impact factors evaluate OM journal quality from another perspective and can be used with other methods to rank OM journals (122 characters) ► Impact factors are likely to shape and influence future perception of OM journal quality (88 characters) This paper investigates impact factor as a metric for ranking the quality of journal outlets for operations management (OM) research. We review all prior studies that assessed journal outlets for OM research and compare all previous OM journal quality rankings to rankings based on impact factors. We find that rankings based on impact factors that use data from different time periods are highly correlated and provide similar rankings of journals using either two‐year or five‐year assessment periods, either with or without self‐citations. However, some individual journals have large rank changes using different impact factor specifications. We also find that OM journal rankings based on impact factors are only moderately correlated with journal quality rankings previously determined using other methods, and the agreement among these other methods in ranking the quality of OM journals is relatively modest. Thus, impact factor rankings alone are not a replacement for the assessment methods used in previous studies, but rather they evaluate OM journals from another perspective.