JmcQ

The current issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly is out. The lead article alone is worth a read (stop what you're doing and go directly there, read it, let it become a part of you). But here I'm more interested in the outgoing editor's essay with interesting numbers on the numbers of articles published by our flagship academic journal from 1993-2013. In the list, he ranks universities by number of articles submitted, and below that he ranks them by number of articles published. University of Texas, for example, leads in submissions (130) but is ranked third in terms of publications (29). Michigan State ranks fourth in terms of submissions (98) but first in terms of pubs (32).

Although the editor doesn't do it, below I take these two stats and create a new number we'll call Academic Success Rate -- or, simply, number of pubs divided by number of subs. I'm doing this on the fly, but the numbers look right, and I'm taking only the top programs from the two lists. Certainly there's a school out there with a perfect score -- one sub, one pub -- but it's not appearing in my number crunching. By my count, Indiana is the most successful with a .34 (or 34 percent of its subs becoming pubs). Georgia, where I teach, is seventh and would probably be higher if I'd stop sending stuff to the journal. I may have missed something somewhere, but you get the idea.

Rank	School	Score
1	Indiana	.34
2	Alabama	.33
2	Michigan State	.33
4	Florida	.30
4	Ohio State	.30
4	Washington State	.30
7	Georgia	.27
8	Southern Illinois	.22
8	Texas	.22
8	Wisconsin	.22
11	Missouri	.20

 
A few words about this analysis -- many faculty at top schools, even in journalism and mass comm, also submit to other top communication academic journals or even journals just outside our field.  On a related note, some schools not traditionally viewed as tops in the field may only submit their stuff to JQ (old name, sorry, JMCQ. I suspect Wisconsin's large submission rate has to do with its tradition of grad students flooding conferences and journals. Yes, other schools do it too, but Wisconsin is famous for it.

If I messed up my math, or missed a school, lemme know.