Ranking of Design Journals Based on Results of the UK Research Excellence Framework: Using REF as Referee

Design researchers disseminate their work through many outlets. Journals have been, and continue to be, a vital conduit by which research methods and results are reported. Journal paper authors want their work to be published in the best possible titles, but ranking of journals is notoriously difficult and always controversial. This paper takes a new approach to finding a referee to rank journal popularity: analysis of the results of the 2014 UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), Art and Design panel. Institutional submissions that scored best in terms of research output ‘originality, significance and rigour’ had the highest proportion of print (journal and book) outputs. The journals in which papers selected by submitting institutions were published were analysed to determine the most common titles. When filtered to include the highest ranked ‘design’ submissions, the most popular design-focused journal titles were The Design Journal, Applied Ergonomics, Ergonomics, Journal of Design Research and Design Issues. There was no correlation between journal citation metrics and the analysis of REF results indicating that quality assessments require detailed individual scrutiny of outputs. The methodology used has limitations: the data is only based on UK institutions submitting to the Art and Design panel, the method of counting journals may skew results towards larger titles with more papers published, and the results from REF do not allow for scrutiny of individual outputs