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24 J. Legal Aspects Sport 1 (2014)

handle is hein.journals/jlas24 and id is 1 raw text is: Journal of LegalAspects of Sport, 2014, 24, 1-2 Official Journal of SRLA http://dx.doi.org/10.1123/jlas.2014-0005 © 2014 Sport and Recreation Law Association COMMENTARY Perspectives on Journal Impact and the Journal of Legal Aspects of Sport J. 0. Spengler, University of Florida John J. Miller, Troy University The Journal of Legal Aspects of Sport (JLAS) is on solid footing with the number and quality of submissions on the rise. The journal's relationship with Human Kinetics Publishing Company has been a large part of this success. Back issues that were previously inaccessible have been digitized and made available to scholars and practitioners. This means that JLAS should expect growth in the number of citations to its articles and improvement in the citation rate. Measures of journal quality include those based on a determination of how often ajournal is cited among scientific journals of similar type (e.g., ISI Journal Citation Reports) or over a broader spectrum of publications (e.g., Harzing's Publish or Perish). A measure of quality for law reviews and legal journals by citation rate also exists (e.g., Washington and Lee School of Law, Law Journals: Submissions and Rankings). Measures of journal quality, however, are sometimes viewed from perspectives beyond citation analysis (Shilbury & Rentschler, 2007). Some sport and recreation management departments have an internally devel- oped list of journal rankings in which JLAS is listed as an A ranked or top-tier publication. Further, a study by Batista and Pittman (2006) identified JLAS as the most highly ranked sport law journal within the field of sport management. How- ever, common scientific ranking indices, such as ISI Journal Citation Reports, do not currently index JLAS. Given the growth phase of the journal, we believe that this will change, with an ISI Impact Factor listing on the near horizon. As we thought more deeply about journal quality and JLAS, additional issues and questions came to mind. We wondered: What types of JLAS articles (topics) are most often cited by other journals and publications? Does JLAS have an inter- national reach? What fields and disciplines cite JLAS? Do high quality and high impact journals cite the work of our journal authors? To find answers to these questions, we turned to Harzing's Publish or Perish, a software program that uses Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search to obtain and analyze academic citations, and provides certain metrics as well as lists the sources that have cited a publication of interest. Our intent was to use Harzing to gain perspective on the quality of our journal and to satisfy our initial curiosity. A more thorough follow-up would yield additional information. Here is what we discovered. First, we used Harzing to find the most cited articles and gain a better under- standing of article topics that received the most attention in the literature. The

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