A methodology for evaluating grades of journals: a fuzzy set-based group decision support system

Many universities, research institutions and government agencies are continuously attempting to grade or rank journals according to their academic value. Such grading is needed both for personnel decisions and for finding and resource allocation purposes. The grading of journals is related to both objective information, such as the impact ratios of the journals, and to subjective information, such as experts´ judgements about the journals. Most of the existing journal grade evaluation methods only consider one of these aspects. The paper provides a fuzzy set-based group decision support model that integrates objective and subjective evaluations to provide a comprehensive method for evaluating grades of journals. This paper also presents a fuzzy set approach to deal with the imprecise and missing information inherited in the evaluation process and in subjective information. The system is available on the Web.