A philosopher who has “long been skeptical of journal rankings” based on polls or Scopus data has developed a new way of assessing philosophy journals: by how frequently their articles are cited in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Tadeusz Ciecierski, a philosopher at the University of Warsaw, describes his method:

The idea is simple: rank journals by citations to their articles in the bibliographies of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP). The counting rule is one distinct paper per encyclopedia entry: repeated references to the same paper within one entry count once, while the same paper cited in five different entries counts five times, etc. Books and chapters in edited volumes are outside the intended scope. There are nine variants: SEP and IEP combined, SEP alone, and IEP alone, each covering papers published in 1900–2026, 1945–2026, or 1990–2026.

Ciecierski notes that this is a work in progress and that he is continuing to revise it and comb it for errors.

He also says “Nor am I presenting this as a recommendation about where to publish. There are virtues, above all, open access, that I consider enormously important independently of any journal’s position in a ranking. Citation counts are not a complete measure of scholarly value.”

Here are the top 100 journals in the ranking taking into account citations in both the SEP and the IEP between 1900 and 2026:

And here are the top 100 journals in the version of the ranking that, while again looking at citations in the SEP and IEP, limits the timeframe to the past 36 years:

All of the variants of the rankings can be found here.

Meanwhile, Nat Hansen (Reading) shared on Bluesky a version of the previous ranking “normalized by the number of articles published in each journal”—though just the top 29 journals:

Hansen says, “Lots of little decisions impact these rankings, so I encourage other people to have a go at it as well.”