Editorial

What ranking does it have and how would I find its "impact factor" and "immediacy index" as our library does not have Journal citation reports (hard to believe, but true!)

1. Data on web page access to AJET ("hit counts") shows strong growth (Atkinson, 2001 - see Table 1 below for a brief update). The mid year period centered upon July is a slower period for hit counts, presumably due to staff and students taking inter-semester breaks at Australian universities and midsummer holidays in the northern hemisphere.

Date	Home	Search	Vol 14	Vol 15	Vol 16	Vol 17
7 Aug 00	35789	4929	8742	9285	951	-
5 Feb 01	45434	6844	9946	11404	3242	-
5 Apr 01	50059	7807	10401	12237	4313	-
4 Jun 01	54517	8802	10752	12831	5276	866
6 Aug 01	58558	9620	11106	13384	6178	1664

Access counts for individual articles in AJET show encouraging rates (Table 2). A remarkably high rate continues for McLoughlin (1999), as commented upon in earlier discussion of access counts (Atkinson, 2001).

Issue	17(1)	16(3)	16(2)	16(1)	15(3)	15(2)	15(1)
Av. accesses per week	70.6	27.6	23.6	22.8	41.1	8.2	14.9
Range	9-100	10-38	9-40	9-37	23-131	5-10	5-22

2. AJET's profile with the Internet's major search engines is very pleasing. Table 3 (below) updates a previous review (Atkinson, 1999).

Search engine and search string	Rank of AJET site (date of search); (notes)
http://www.google.com/ journal of educational technology	1st in about 597,000 results (27 Aug 2001)
http://www.goeureka.com.au/ journal of educational technology	1st in 4286 matches (27 Aug 2001)
http://au.altavista.com/ journal of educational technology	1st in 1554485 pages (27 Aug 2001) (select "worldwide")
http://www.anzwers.com.au/ journal of educational technology	3rd in 2040 (27 Aug 2001) (select exact phrase option)
http://www.looksmart.com.au/ journal of educational technology	2nd match (27 Aug 2001)
http://www.yahoo.com.au/ journal of educational technology	1st of 262000 matches (27 Aug 2001) (select exact phrase, web pages)
http://www.alltheweb.com/ journal of educational technology	1st of 5610 docs (27 Aug 2001) (select exact phrase option)
http://www.lycos.com/ journal of educational technology	1st in 323,818 web sites (27 Aug 2001)
http://search.excite.com/ journal of educational technology	2nd of about 4,816,475 sites (27 Aug 2001)
http://infoseek.go.com/ "journal of educational technology"	3rd in unspecified number (27 Aug 2001) (include double quotes)

3. Although AJET's number of library subscribers to the printed version is small (47 subscribers, including 7 legal deposit and complimentary subscribers, with some renewals pending), our price per article is surely one of the best values amongst current scholarly journals, being in the range A$1.70-2.70. Furthermore, AJET is free to the Internet after the three month period of restricted access for each new issue.

4. The number of submissions is good, with about 40-60% being accepted.

AJET Vol, year (no. of articles)	No. of cits	Citations of an AJET article		Citations of an Aust or NZ Conf Proceedings
		No.	%	No.	%
17, 2001 (13)	336	17	5.1	29	8.6
16, 2000 (18)	407	9	2.2	32	7.9
15, 1999 (15)	414	4	1.0	23	5.6
14, 1998 (10)	132	3	2.3	16	12.1
13, 1997 (10)	220	1	0.5	28	12.7
13-17, 97-01 (66)	1509	34	2.3	128	8.5

We could expect citations of AJET articles to be at a relatively high rate in AJET, compared with other journals publishing similar topics. AJET's authors may be expected to be reasonably familiar with articles in AJET - otherwise they would select some other, more familar journal for submitting their work. However, Table 4 indicates that only a small percentage of the citations made in AJET are citations of AJET articles, although an encouraging upward trend may have commenced in 2001. The AJET articles most frequently cited by AJET authors were Freeman (1997) with four citations, and Mason and Weller (2000) with three citations.

Table 4 also records numbers of citations of an Australian or New Zealand conference proceedings, because this category may provide an illustrative benchmark comparison for AJET (presumably this category is familiar reading for AJET authors - in the sample period for Table 4, only 3 articles (4.5%) were contributed by authors working in countries other than Australia and New Zealand). The most frequently cited conference proceedings in the sample period were ASCILITE [1] (51 citations, 3.4%) and AusWeb [2] (18 citations, 1.2%). URLs for these proceedings and for many other Australian conferences are listed on ASET's website [3].

Does the data in Table 4 suggest that as a source of research references, AJET compares poorly, or competes poorly, with Australian and New Zealand conference proceedings? There isn't a simple answer because the comparison is complex - AJET doesn't charge authors, whilst conferences do charge authors; AJET doesn't provide conference dinners... (this line of investigation will be continued...).

Roger Atkinson
AJET Production Editor

Endnotes

1. ASCILITE Conference Proceedings. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/

2. Ausweb Proceedings. http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/

3. ASET (2001). Proceedings available online. A brief listing for some Australian and New Zealand professional society conferences in the past decade.
   http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/gen/aset/confs/conf-procs.html

References

Atkinson, R. J. (1999). Editorial. Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 15(3), iii-vi.
http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet15/editorial15-3.html

Freeman, M. (1997). Flexibility in access, interaction and assessment: The case for web-based teaching programs. Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 13(1), 23-39.
http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet13/freeman.html

Mason, R. and Weller, M. (2000). Factors affecting students' satisfaction on a web course. Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 16(2), 173-200. http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet16/mason.html

McLoughlin, C. (1999). The implications of the research literature on learning styles for the design of instructional material. Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 15(3), 222-241.
http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet15/mcloughlin.html

Conferences advertised in AJET 17(2)

http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/ajet/
[For post-2001 details see http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet.html]

AJET's 2001 Editorial Board, nominated by ASCILITE and ASET is:

Ron Oliver (Editor), Edith Cowan University
Roger Atkinson (Production Editor), Murdoch University
Cathy Gunn, University of Auckland
Barry Harper, University of Wollongong
Mary Jane Mahony, University of Sydney
Clare McBeath, Curtin University of Technology
Sue McNamara, Monash University
Rod Sims, Southern Cross University

© 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this journal may be reprinted or reproduced without permission from the publishers. ISSN 0814-673X.