Do journal rankings reflect research quality?

In the UK, academic research quality in all disciplines has for many years been measured by a periodic, national “Research Assessment Exercise” (RAE). The most recent of these took place in 2008, using data from 2001-2007 (see http://www.rae.ac.uk/). In the future, the RAE is to be replaced by a new “Research Excellence Framework”, with seemingly greater emphasis on the use of “metric” data such as research-grant income and citation counts. This talk will explore the face validity of some methods of scoring academic journals on the basis of citation counts, in particular by comparison with the results of the 2008 RAE.