Peter Hall∗ Ranking journals

Journal ranking, and more generally the potential for assessing the excellence of mathematical work in terms of where it is published, has become an important issue in connection with the Research Quality Framework (RQF). The Society enjoys a diversity of views on this subject. Some members are reasonably enthusiastic about the concept of journal-ranking (or placing of journals into bands), believing (as do more than a few people outside the mathematics profession) that the journal where a research paper is published can be used very effectively to benchmark the paper’s excellence. At the other end of the spectrum there are concerns that the ‘standing ’ of the journals where we publish is not directly or simply related to the ‘standard ’ of individual research papers, and that suggesting the existence of a strong connection could cause serious problems for the profession. In the middle, somewhere between these two viewpoints, a number of members of the Society see journal ranking as a necessary evil — as something which we might not strongly support but which we should nevertheless embrace, becaus