Thom Brooks (Newcastle) compiles a list of the A*, A, and B journals from the APA exercise. The A* list isn't bad, apart from some dubious inclusions (probably meant to pander to this-or-that interest group) like Hypatia, Political Theory, and Philosophy East and West. (The best work in feminist philosophy, for example, has surely appeared in many of the other A* journals, not in Hypatia, and important work in political philosophy--the kind that engages philosophers--rarely appears in Political Theory.) But after the A* journals, it all gets a bit arbitrary. I would be hard-pressed to distinguish between many of the A and B journals, or between many of the A and B journals, and journals that were omitted altogether.
UPDATE: Correspondence from two different readers makes clear that some may not understand the institutional context of this ranking. As I understand it, the ranking of journals will ultimately affect funding of departments and universities depending on which journals their faculty members publish in. This means every group with a particular scholarly interest has a huge incentive to push to have their 'pet' journal ranked highly in this exercise. So the Kant mafia in Australasia and the feminist philosophers and the comparative philosophers obviously lobbied, successfully, to get their specialty journals into the same category with much broader (and generally better-established) philosophy journals. Anyone who thinks saying that some of these journals don't belong on the A* list is insulting must really have a dim view of the journals on the A list!
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