Fluctuations in value: the shifting worth of journal articles in educational administration.

Journal rankings are increasingly being used as proxies for assessing the quality and worth of individual faculty and their contribution to institutional performance. Problematic within this agenda is the historical mapping and projection of current journal rankings. Individual papers are being assessed against criteria far removed - temporally - from when decisions were made regarding where to publish. Drawing upon three examples of publishing in educational administration journals, this paper explores how the assessment of paper quality is dislocated from the scholarly labour that generates those outputs in the first place. Different ranking systems and often lengthy submission to publication processes mean that the worth of individual papers can dramatically shift independent of any actual engagement with the content of the paper. The value of an individual’s track record can fluctuate quickly and any intervention to alter the situation takes time to come into effect. This paper does not suggest replacing one ranking system with another, or even remove research assessment. Rather, it offers a means of problematising the application of journal rankings by calling into question their timelessness. In doing, it provides the intellectual resources to make strange the status quo and open the prospect of alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]