Are questions about journal data on topic?

Question

Are questions about journal statistics on topic here?

e.g.

• what is the impact factor of journal x? (probably shouldn't need to ask it here as this info is widely available)
• what is the average review time for journal x?
• what are the average times from submission to acceptance/publication for journal x?
• what are the current (2015) rankings for journals in the field of x? (such info can be found for older rankings, but recent info is generaly behind a paywall... example of rankings)

Personally I think they could be on topic because they are objective (rather than subjective shopping questions) requests for information which is highly relevant to academics.

Answer 1

The questions you have listed are indeed not shopping questions. However, they are still not appropriate for the site, because they fall under the "too specific" category. If we allow such questions for an arbitrary journal X, then we have to allow similar questions for every journal. We don't want to have the site flooded with such questions, so this would be off-topic.

On the other hand, questions about how to determine these statistics in general would be OK, since they are not tied to individual journals.

Answer 2

In addition to what Aeismail said, if the answers to the first three questions aren’t available on the journal’s website, they are very difficult to obtain (unless you work for the respective journal). Therefore most of such answers are either very easy to answer or very unlikely to ever be answered.