Sociology: What are the most prestigious open access sociology journals? - Quora

[The following question was posted to Quora. “Quora connects you to everything you want to know about. Quora aims to be the easiest place to write new content and share content from the web. We organize people and their interests so you can find, collect and share the information most valuable to you.”] [Q] “Sociology: What are the most prestigious open access sociology journals? Here I am talking about academic journals in the vein of Social Forces and American Sociological Review.” [A] “Prestige being a somewhat subjective factor, I have interpreted it to mean the journal has a high impact factor (a measure of the average number of citations for recent articles - as Wikipedia says, this rating is often used as a proxy for the relative importance of the journal). IF looks at citations over 2-3 years. Another related factor is the Immediacy Index, which looks at just the last year and is thought to be a good measure of how quickly a journal has impact. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals, there are 137 open access journals in the subject of sociology. According to research by Mcveigh (2004), there were 239 journal titles in the social sciences category in June 2004 (of course, social science is a broader category than sociology). Overall, McVeigh found that of all journals (8818 in total in April 2004), around 2.7% (239) were open access. In general, McVeigh found open access journals tend to be lower ranking in terms of either IF or Immediacy. Of the total number of journals McVeigh found in the ISI Citation Database (which collects data on IF and Immediacy), only two were even in the category of social science (Dados Revista De Ciencias Sociais and The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Stimulation) and neither were sociological. So, my answer would be there are no prestigious sociology open access journals (of which I am aware). In 2007, the top 5 ranked sociological journals were: American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Global Networks.”