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ABSTRACT
After 5 decades of the Urban Affairs Association, more than 4 decades of the Journal of Urban Affairs (JUA), and with the departure of an editorial team, this seems an opportune moment to assess the contribution made by the journal to the field of urban affairs. This paper takes both an historical and analytical approach to this evaluation, detailing the institutional challenges associated with the journal’s production, coupled with identification of key themes in its catalog of papers. The historical exploration of defining articles and notable authors provides a retrospective of the key urban issues that have defined the JUA over the last 4 decades. We also undertake a content analysis of the JUA, utilizing Web of Science data, which dates back to 1993. This bibliometric analysis sheds further light on influential JUA authors, articles and topics, as well as key conceptual, intellectual, and social patterns and trends in the journal over the last four decades.
Acknowledgments
The authors are very grateful to Andrew Kirby, Bernadette Hanlon, Deirdre Pfeiffer, Deidre Beadle, and Casey Wagner for valuable comments and criticism that helped improve this article. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful critique of earlier drafts of this paper, which were important in improving the quality of this work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Interviews
Victoria Basolo interview. August 10, 2020.
Scott Cummings interview. November 24, 2020. January 4, 2023.
Robin Hambleton interview. August 13, 2020.
Casey Wagner interview. October 2, 2020.
Margaret Wilder interview. October 3, 2020. February 11, 2021. June 16, 2021. October 24, 2022. March 28, 2023.
Notes
1. Since 2013, NASPAA became known as the Network of Schools of Public Policy Affairs.
2. Web of Science is currently part of Clarivate Analytics.
3. In online Appendix A, a comparison is provided showing the internationalization of the editorial team between 2003 and 2020, showing the growing interest in expanding the JUA’s impact globally.
4. Over the course of his first term, Vojnovic would make a number of editorial changes, including one that strengthened review papers. When Kirby stepped down from his editor role in Cities, he was brought onto the JUA as a managing editor for review papers. Deirde Pfeiffer (Arizona State University) became the new managing editor of housing and community development when Deirdre Oakley became the editor in chief of City & Community. After serving for 5 years with the JUA, Eric Clark, who started to transition into retirement at Lund, stepped down and Tom Slater became the European managing editor. In addition, after spending several years trying to add an Africa managing editor, Patrick Cobbinah (University of Melbourne) came into the role and his initial project was focused on producing the first JUA special issue on Africa, Understandings of Global South Urbanism: The Identity of African Cities.
5. SHERPA RoMEO utilizes four different colors to differentiate degrees of publisher open-access policies in the self-archiving of articles (Jenkins et al., Citation2007). “Green” is the most open policy, allowing both pre- and post-prints to be self-archived. “Blue” allows for only post-prints to be archived, while “Yellow” allows for only pre-prints to be self-archived. “White” is the most restrictive publisher’s policy, not allowing pre- or post-prints to be self-archived.
6. The impact factor is used to rank journals, which is done annually, with a variety of scholarly research impact metrics available for this indexing process. One of the authoritative resources is a Clarivate Analytics product, Journal Citation Reports (JCR), available through the Web of Science website. Published annually, it provides 2- and 5-year journal impact factors, along with the journal ranking in different areas of study.
7. There were two concerns associated with publishing shorter commentary pieces. One is that they were not getting the larger citation numbers of research papers and review papers. The IF is calculated by the number of citations in the impact factor year that the two previous years of citable articles received, divided by the number of citable articles published during the two previous years. This means that while the shorter pieces were adding to the value of the denominator (the number of articles published)—with a greater number of shorter papers being published in order to meet the annual page number publication requirements—they were not contributing to the numerator (the citations). The formula for IF is shown below in Equation 1.
Equation 1: Impact factor (IF) calculation, with year 2020 used as an example.
Notice also, however, if there are significant fluctuations in published papers from year to year, and particularly if the more recent publication year has a significantly higher paper count (in the example above, papers published in 2019), the articles will not have much exposure to readers, and will not have a chance to be cited, but their large numbers will increase the denominator and reduce the IF. To provide an example, imagine if the above 2020 JUA impact factor consisted of 30 papers published in 2018 and 60 papers published in 2019. Generally, in the calculation of the IF, the papers published in the later year, here 2019, due to the more limited time of exposure to readers, tend to be cited far less, even though the 60 papers for that year would substantially increase the denominator, pulling down the IF. And with shorter commentary pieces getting fewer citations while considerably increasing the number of articles published annually, they were not only helping encourage large annual fluctuations in the IF, but also, generally a lower IF.
8. The importance of publishing textured qualitative analyses that advance new and broader conceptual and/or theoretical insights on specific urban topics from the more comprehensive review emerged initially out of conversations with Andrew Kirby and Ali Modarres, the former editors of the Elsevier journal Cities. Kirby developed and managed Current Research on Cities (CRoC), a Cities supplement focused on meta-analysis urban articles. Given these insights, Vojnovic proceeded to pursue review papers much more aggressively.
9. It should also be recognized that as the JUA transitioned to Taylor & Francis, a new method of measuring journal impact began to be emphasized. It ensured broader and more comprehensive bibliometrics, and it also stressed the importance, again, for editorial teams to be adaptive and responsive to ongoing change in publishing. In 2010, in response to the rise of social media and the expanded discussion of scientific literature within different online outlets, Altmetric scores emerged as a measurement of the dissemination of articles in the news, blogs, podcasts, social media platforms and policy documents. Altmetrics, which stands for “article-level metrics” or “alternative metrics”, is a score that reflects the overall attention that an article receives; a weighted count of the various sources that mention a particular published paper. However, Altmetric scores do not rely on citation-based metrics, such as citation counts or an author’s H-index, and hence the measurement does not recognize formal scientific impact (Gumpenberger et al., Citation2016; Routledge/T&F Group, Citation2021; Trueger et al., Citation2015).
10. In 2005, the JUA’s 0.766 IF ensured a 6th ranking, and in 2007, a 1.280 IF secured a 4th ranking.
11. In the context of Google Scholar Metrics, in the Urban Studies & Planning subcategory, which ranks publications based on their last 5-year h-index and h-median metrics, the JUA is not ranked in the top 20 journals. See: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&vq=soc_urbanstudiesplanning. Accessed on July 12, 2021.
12. If a paper received both an award as “Best Article in the JUA” and ‘Best Conference Paper” and had at least 20 Google Scholar citations, it was also included as a high-impact article. However, if it won just one of the awards it required 25 citations to be included as a high-impact article.
13. These thresholds were established after seeing natural breaks in the citations. Again, some might consider these citation numbers to be low, but for the first 6 years of the journal, the papers had little impact. Then around 1985, paper citations begin to appear more regularly, but generally in low numbers. We thought that it would be important to recognize these initial papers that began to garner early attention for the JUA.
14. Over the years, Sako Musterd would contribute to a number of high-impact articles published within the JUA, including in the areas of housing and social and ethnic segregation.
15. Galster’s UAA Contribution to the Field of Urban Affairs Award in 2016 was a reflection of not only his impact to the Urban Affairs Association, but to the urban community more broadly.
16. This figure includes all authors, not just corresponding authors on publications.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Igor Vojnovic
Igor Vojnovic is professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Spatial Sciences at Michigan State University. His main areas of research focus on urban (re)development processes and the study of resulting socioeconomic, physical, environmental and health impacts. He has been associate editor (2010–2015) and the editor in chief (2015–2021) of the Journal of Urban Affairs (JUA). He is currently a JUA senior associate editor.
Laurie A. Schintler
Laurie A. Schintler is an associate professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, where she is Director of Data and Technology Initiatives in the Center for Regional Analysis. Dr. Schintler received her PhD in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Her expertise and research interests span many areas, including urban and regional science, science and technology, and big data analytics.