Journal Prestige as Perceived by Health Administration Faculty in the United States

Journal rankings play a critical role in guiding academic publishing decisions, assessing the productivity of health administration (HA) faculty, and informing their tenure and promotion evaluations. Healthcare executives and practitioners rely on rankings to help them assess the quality of empirical analyses and the underlying peer-review process of published articles. Despite periodic assessments in the HA field, journal prestige-an important metric for faculty success-has not been evaluated in more than a decade, leaving a gap in understanding current perceptions amid the rapidly evolving landscape of scholarly publishing. The objective of this current study is to update perceptions of journal prestige among HA faculty and examine changes over the past decade.

As part of a larger, periodic, anonymous online survey distributed to a nationally representative group of HA faculty members in 2024, respondents were asked to list three journals they considered most prestigious in the HA field. Data were coded and analyzed to identify top journals, assess changes in rankings since 2012, and examine variations by faculty characteristics and areas of expertise using logistic regression models.

The top-ranked journal was Health Affairs (35.1%), followed by Health Services Research (20.7%), Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) (15.9%), and Journal of Healthcare Management (10.9%). Rankings largely aligned with previous findings, though JAMA experienced a notable rise in prestige (+5 positions since 2012), partially driven by the emergence of its open access subjournal, JAMA Health Forum. Journal prestige was not correlated with journal impact factors (Spearman's Rho [ρ] = 0.053; p = .41). Variations in journal selection were observed among faculty with expertise in informatics and outcomes research, who ranked discipline-specific journals higher.

This study's findings provide faculty with a current reference for selecting publication outlets and for documenting scholarly impact in promotion and tenure reviews. For department chairs and program directors, the findings offer a field-specific benchmark that can inform evaluation standards. For healthcare executives and practitioners, the top-ranked journals highlight priority sources for evidence-based decision-making and practice-oriented dissemination. The growing prominence of newer and open access journals further underscores the need for periodic reassessment of preferred outlets to ensure continued relevance in the HA field.