Editor's Notes

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21254
• Date: 01 December 2016
• Author: Mark A. Hager
• Published date: 01 December 2016

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N M  L, vol. 27, no. 2, Winter 2016 © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/nml.21254

Journal sponsored by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University.

EDITOR ’ S NOTES

ON DECEMBER 31, fi ve members of the editorial board of Nonprofi t Management & Leader-

ship will end their terms, completing this dimension of their service with the journal. I thank

Deborah Balser, Xavier Castañer, Karen Froelich, Chao Guo, and Tom Pollak for their con-

tributions to Nonprofi t Management & Leadership .

When I took on the role of editor of Nonprofit Management & Leadership nearly two years

ago, I described my vision for a subtle change in orientation for the journal. That orienta-

tion includes less emphasis on writing for an applied audience (since other outlets and

modes have emerged in recent years to meet those needs) and more emphasis on the needs of

scholars (since the field has grown and produced the need for more venues for publication of

scholarly research). Perhaps the most visible evidence of this change is the journal ’ s emphasis

on research articles and notes, and the disappearance of the journal ’ s “From the Field” fea-

ture. This issue of the journal is packed with five full-length articles and four shorter research

notes, and is a good example of the current direction of the journal. These articles speak to

practice, but they showcase the scholarly talents of their authors.

The success of this change in orientation is hard to gauge empirically. The puzzle is fairly easy

to articulate: the scholarly value of the journal is judged by the visibility of the manuscripts

it publishes, and that visibility is measured by the extent to which other scholars cite those

manuscripts in future published work. Google has emerged in recent years as a key resource

in measuring the penetration of a given scholarly work, since its search algorithms are able to

track citation of individual manuscripts in both scholarly and non-scholarly outlets, includ-

ing reports and working papers. I plan to return in a future editorial to the question of what

Google offers us in monitoring the penetration of articles published in Nonprofit Manage-

ment & Leadership , but for now I want to concentrate on the more standard measure, the

“impact factor.”

The Impact Factor

The impact factor is calculated and promulgated by the Institute of Scientific Information

(ISI) in its annual Journal Citation Reports. Your university ’ s library might subscribe to these

reports; mine does. The impact factor focuses on article citation in other scholarly journals rec-

ognized (indexed) by ISI. So, it includes the most reputable and recognized journals, but not

all journals. Importantly, it does not consider citations in scholarly books, and it does not con-

sider citations in research reports, dissertations, and working papers. The impact factor sets its

measure at a specific bar: how much is a manuscript being cited by other recent peer-reviewed

articles published in recognized journals? For some, the answer to this question is the gold

standard for evaluating the work of individual scholars and the outlets in which they publish.

Nonprofit Management & Leadership was recognized by ISI relatively recently, receiving its

first Journal Citation Reports two-year impact factor in 2011. I can report those annual two-

year impact factors as 0.580 (2011), 0.449 (2012), 0.346 (2013), 0.529 (2014), and 0.653