In 2010, the Excellence in Research in Australia (ERA) initiative used a set of journal rankings as part of the basis for assessing research quality in Australian higher education. These rankings were subsequently dropped for ERA2012 but many universities continue to use them for internal assessment purposes. The APSA Executive decided that, as the peak body in Political Science and International Relations in Australia, it would be beneficial to our community if we provided our own updated preferred journal rankings for the 1606 and 1605 FOR codes to be used in combination with other metric data rather than relying on the artefact of the ERA 2010 rankings.
The list was reviewed and updated by a sub-group of the Executive in August 2013. Following recent submissions regarding the APSA 2013 ranked journals list, a sub-committee was tasked with drafting an updated APSA 2016 ranked journals. At the Annual General Meeting on 27 September, 2016, a vote was taken and a motion carried to replace the 2013 list with the updated 2016 list:
Further information about the methodology informing this process and the membership of the working party can be found in the following documents: