Joshua Chalifour

The hype over the last few months regarding generative AI has been quite
interesting. I've facilitated a variety of discussions (and presented
some) with faculty, staff, and other librarians regarding these tools
and I've been following the public discourse. The thing that I keep
coming back to and which I don't feel gets the attention that it merits,
is the potential to **consider these newer AI systems, LLMs, etc. as
tools to be used for examining human cultures, behaviours, and
society**.

Most conversations I've seen about the utility of these tools revolves
around the novelty of what they produce (text outputs, image outputs,
coding assistants, etc.) and the ramifications. That garners debate on
the ethics of how they work and how those outputs may be used,
legitimate or otherwise. It certainly deserves critical analysis. In
many ways though these systems are banal, they're essentially
instructions for identifying and repeating patterns.

What, to me, is incredible about them is not just that they're
identifying patterns in human behaviour (all the material that they're
trained on), but that once these patterns are identified, we now see
that it becomes possible to generate new content believably replicating
the patterns. That seems enormous for better studying and understanding
*ourselves*.

Yesterday, when the Center for AI Safety posted its [Statement on AI
Risk](https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk), [I
felt](https://cosocial.ca/@owlyph/110459623979640299) the underlying
premises or motivation for the statement were concerning. The statement
(signed by many business leaders, academics, and others with significant
stakes or interests in AI) says:

> Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority
> alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear
> war.

On the surface, this seems agreeable, however there's so much to unpack
in that statement. I'm not interested in attempting that now; I think AI
is murkier than it's presented there. I would like to refer to my
initial point. Human-created, AI is essentially mirroring us. The
statement's formulation is both disingenuous and abdicates
responsibility. The statement starts off in the wrong.

If AI systems produce results or get used in ways that create the real
possibility of exterminating human-kind, then we need to seriously
examine and change these patterns in human behaviour that enable that.
What is it about the hundreds of thousands of social media conversations
that were scraped to train the model, which repeats in such ways that it
is possible to predict a new utterance that humans accept as the way
we'd expect a human to talk? What is that in all the Wikipedia entries?
What is that in all the digitized magazine and newspaper advertisements?
Because who thought that human culture is so incredibly predictable that
non-living, non-thinking, non-feeling algorithms can give the appearance
of something indistinguishable from a human?

The fear expressed in the statement is not a fear of AI at all. It's a
fear of humans destroying ourselves. If the people developing AI treat
it as an object of otherness, promote it as such, and encourage
discourse of it as such--if we all adopt that discourse, we distance
ourselves from ourselves and cannot understand what we are doing. I hope
to see more serious research projects in the humanities and social
sciences, which focus on the *lens that AI is* and then *examine it for
understanding our cultures and behaviours*.


The hype over the last few months regarding generative AI has been quite interesting. I’ve facilitated a variety of discussions (and presented some) with faculty, staff, and other librarians regarding these tools and I’ve been following the public discourse. The thing that I keep coming back to and which I don’t feel gets the attention that it merits, is the potential to
<strong>
 consider these newer AI systems, LLMs, etc.
</strong>

Artificial Intelligence to Examine Us

Ulrich Herb

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized">
<a
href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Distribution_of_citations_over_time.png"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"></a>
<div class="cc-attribution-box-container">
<img
src="https://scidecode.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Journal-Rakings-Ratings.png"
class="wp-image-4400" style="width:388px" decoding="async"
alt="Journal Rakings Ratings" />
<div class="cc-attribution-box">

</div>
</div>
<figcaption>Licensed under the <a
href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
aria-label="undefined (opens in a new tab)" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener">Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
International license</a>. Published on <a
href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Distribution_of_citations_over_time.png"
aria-label="undefined (opens in a new tab)" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener">wikimedia</a> by <a
href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Miriam_(WMF)"
aria-label="undefined (opens in a new tab)" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener">Miriam (WMF)</a></figcaption>
</figure>

While preparing a
[workshop](https://scidecode.com/dienstleistungen-projekte/workshops-zu-strategien-wissenschaftlichen-publizierens/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} I was looking for journal ratings & rankings in the
Social Sciences & Humanities and would like to share my information
here. At the same time, I would like to encourage readers to make
additions to the comments.

## Social Sciences: Journal ratings & rankings {#social-sciences-journal-ratings-rankings .wp-block-heading}

**GESIS List** (Mostly German): 
[https://www.gesis.org/fileadmin/upload/dienstleistung/fachinformationen/db_infosysteme/Zeitschriften.pdf](https://www.gesis.org/fileadmin/upload/dienstleistung/fachinformationen/db_infosysteme/Zeitschriften.pdf){aria-label="undefined (opens in a new tab)"
target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"}  
Compiled by **GESIS -- Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften**. Not
so much a rating or ranking, but rather a selection of high-quality
journals, unfortunately from the year 2011.  
   
**ISA Journal List**  
[https://www.isa-sociology.org/en/opportunities/publication-opportunities/list-of-the-selected-journals](https://www.isa-sociology.org/en/opportunities/publication-opportunities/list-of-the-selected-journals){aria-label="undefined (opens in a new tab)"
target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"}  
Compiled by the **International Sociological Association ISA**. Also,
rather a selection than a rating or ranking: A "List of journals that
are identified as core to the sociological literature by [CSA Illumina
(ProQuest)](http://www.proquest.com/){target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener"}" (taken from the ISA page).  
  
**Jerry A. Jacobs: Journal Rankings in Sociology**  
[https://sociology.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Journal%20Rankings%20in%20Sociology%20november%202015.pdf](https://sociology.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Journal%20Rankings%20in%20Sociology%20november%202015.pdf){aria-label="undefined (opens in a new tab)"
target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"}  
Published in **[The American
Sociologist](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12108-015-9292-7){aria-label="undefined (opens in a new tab)"
target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"}** in the year 2016. The
analysis is based on data from the Web of Science and Google Scholar.  

## Humanities/ Cultural Sciences: Journal ratings & rankings {#humanities-cultural-sciences-journal-ratings-rankings .wp-block-heading}

**European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH)**  
[https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/erihplus/](https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/erihplus/){aria-label="undefined (opens in a new tab)"
target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"}  
A selection of Humanities journals by the **European Reference Index for
the Humanities**.  For information on the selection criteria please
visit the page linked.

**Humanities Journals Wiki**  
[https://humanitiesjournals.fandom.com/wiki/Comparative_Literature,\_Cultural_Studies_and_Theory_Journals](https://humanitiesjournals.fandom.com/wiki/Comparative_Literature,_Cultural_Studies_and_Theory_Journals){aria-label="undefined (opens in a new tab)"
target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"}  
A wiki documenting "the experiences of working with academic journals in
the humanities. Which journals move quickly on submission? Which
journals give useful feedback? Which journals help your research reach
an audience? Which journals are quality outlets, and which are predatory
fakes?" (taken from the wiki's website).  
It is unfortunately unclear who is in control of the wiki, but it is
alive and kicking, there have been several edits in the last 24 hours.

**MLA Directory of Periodicals**  
[https://apps.mla.org/cgi-shl/docstudio/docs.pl?login&msg=requirelogin&xurl=dop](https://apps.mla.org/cgi-shl/docstudio/docs.pl?login&msg=requirelogin&xurl=dop){aria-label="undefined (opens in a new tab)"
target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"}  
A journal list of the Modern Language Association (MLA), also rather a
selection than a rating or ranking.  

## Multidisciplinary journal ratings & rankings {#multidisciplinary-journal-ratings-rankings .wp-block-heading}

Since journals from the Social Sciences & Humanities also show up in
multidisciplinary ratings, rankings and lists, I add the following
multidisciplinary sources.

**Anne Harzing's Journal Quality List**  
[https://harzing.com/resources/journal-quality-list](https://harzing.com/resources/journal-quality-list){aria-label="undefined (opens in a new tab)"
target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"}  
The following description is taken from Anne Harzing's website: "The
Journal Quality List is a collation of journal rankings from a variety
of sources. It is published primarily to assist academics to target
papers at journals of an appropriate standard. We would be concerned if
the list were used for staff evaluation purposes in a mechanistic way."
In fact, Anne Harzing's list is, in my opinion, the richest
multidisciplinary source, since it evaluates numerous (also
disciplinary) ratings and rankings.

**Journal Impact Factor (JIF)**  
[https://jcr.incites.thomsonreuters.com/](https://web.archive.org/web/20191004233147/http://jcr.incites.thomsonreuters.com:80/){label="undefined (opens in a new tab)"
target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"} (paywalled)  
Ranking of journals according to the Journal Impact Factor citation
rates.

**Scimago Journal Rank (SJR)**  
[https://www.scimagojr.com/](https://www.scimagojr.com/){aria-label="undefined (opens in a new tab)"
target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"}  
Ranking based the SJR, a citation based metric calculated with data from
Elsevier's database Scopus.

**Google Scholar**  
[https://scholar.google.de/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=de](https://scholar.google.de/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=de){aria-label="undefined (opens in a new tab)"
target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"}  
Ranking of journals based on Google Scholar's citation counts. Click
"categories" to find disciplinary rankings.  

## Additions welcome {#additions-welcome .wp-block-heading}

Do you know of other journal ratings & rankings in the social sciences &
humanities or multidisciplinary ratings & rankings? Then please share
them with all readers in the comments. If I use your recommendations in
my workshop, don't be afraid --- as always, I share the presentations
under Creative Commons CC BY licence, so every one can (re-)use them.  

## Update {#update .wp-block-heading}

After the aforementioned seminar is over, [I share the materials for the
workshop
here](https://scidecode.com/2020/07/19/publication-strategies-in-the-social-sciences-and-cultural-sciences/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}.

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[This content]{.cc-cgb-name} is licensed under a [Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International
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While preparing a workshop I was looking for journal ratings &amp; rankings in the Social Sciences &amp; Humanities and would like to share my information here. At the same time, I would like to encourage readers to make additions to the comments. Social Sciences: Journal ratings &amp; rankings
<strong>
 GESIS List
</strong>
(Mostly German):

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Artificial Intelligence to Examine Us

Journal Ratings & Rankings in the Social Sciences & Humanities