Call for comments on Google Scholar's - Top Publications in Philosophy

There seems to be a strong societal push for "metrics" which means, as best as I can tell, limiting our reasons to ones that can be uncontroversially translated into something numerical, ignoring other facotrs, and then drawing conclusions.  OK.  That is probably a caricature, but I suspect not much.  

In any event, here, by GS, is another metric-driven ranking of philosophy journals.  It has some rankings that strike me, at least, as rather different from how an expert in the field would rank on the basis of quality, prestige, significance, etc.  So, for example, Synthese and Phil Studies are 1 and 2 (certainly both good journals, but I suspect few philosophers would rank them 1 and 2.)  Or consider that Journal of Consciousness Studies is 7 and Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences is 10.  By contrast, we have Ethics 14, Phil Review 17, and Journal of Philosophical Logic 20.  

Two factors seem to me rather obvious here.  First, the rankings are based on h-5 index, the largest h such that h articles from the journal, published in the last 5 years, have at least h citations.  Obviously this measure privileges journals that publish lots of articles. As there is massive disparity in number of articles per issue and number of issues per year, we have a metric that is pretty hard to take seriously on its own.  Second, we are comparing interdisciplinary journals, general philosophy journals, and specialty journals.  Since philosophy is a very small field - and subfields, say ethics or philosophical logic, even smaller - journals that are read predominantly by philosophers will be swamped by journals read by folks in larger fields like cognitive science.  Again, it is hard to see how such comparisons are meaningful guides to quality in any sense.  

But those are just two factors off the top of my head. I encourage readers to bring up other issues, to discuss the overall question of whether we ought to be relying on such metrics as opposed to expert opinion or perhaps not ranking at all, and to suggest more accurate metrics.