UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Research and information published in the American Journal of Education (AJE) is impacting education and educational research in substantive ways.
The journal, housed in the Penn State College of Education, brings scientific information about a variety of topics in education to a broad public audience and is cited by an increasing number of education researchers in other relevant scholarly journals.
AJE was recently reviewed by the Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports and had a leap in impact factor from 0.711 to 1.590 and was ranked as 29 of 219 journals in the subject category “Education and Educational Research.”
Thomson Reuters’ impact factor is a mean count of citations by other academic publications per article per publication over the course of two years.
AJE, one of the oldest education journals in the country, serves the entire educational community from practitioners to scholars. AJE previously had been identified as one of 11 core journals in education by academic researchers and currently is co-edited by Gerald LeTendre, department head of educational policy studies and professor of education, and Dana Mitra, professor of education.
“(AJE) provides a blend of research and thinking about critical education issues,” LeTendre said. “The topics we cover are important not just for Americans, but for academics, policymakers and practitioners in the world over.”
More than a quarter of a million AJE articles have been downloaded around the world so far in 2014. According to LeTendre, this is the most accurate measure of the journal’s audience.
“Very few people get a hard copy of our journal, or any other scholarly journal, anymore. What’s important now is that journals are bundled and sold in databases to institutions such as libraries,” LeTendre said. “Anyone who has access to these giant institutional databases can now find our articles.”
LeTendre continued to explain how the academic audience has transformed into a broad readership.
“As scholarly publishing in this digital age is now linked to huge institutional contracts and networks, people around the world can access articles,” LeTendre said. “It opens the journal up to a global network of people, whether they are teachers, policy administrators or simply concerned parents.”
The University of Chicago Press, which owns the journal, has engaged in special programs to allow access to institutions in low-income countries.
The journal also hosts the AJE Forum for students and others to comment on issues that are related to the research published in the journal. It is led by a student board, mentored by the journal’s senior editorial staff and features blogs, discussions and videos with journal authors.
LeTendre said the AJE Forum contributed to raising awareness of articles to non-academics.
“The AJE Forum is our way of opening up discussion around the issues and trying to make it more accessible to teachers or parents or school boards who want to have real scientific evidence but may have a hard time slogging through the technical details of the scholarly articles,” LeTendre said. “Our students are doing a great job of bringing up real hot-button items in education and linking them to scholarly research.”