big three, big whoop

Okay, so I'm really not interested in belaboring this, but in my recent post on the Notre Dame "productive faculty" rankings, some commenters have implied that I am ignorant about journal impact factors and that if I looked at them I would see what an obvious "Big 3" there were in sociology. I don't get what other people are looking at and, if people are going to hector me about being ignorant about evidence, I want to know what this evidence is. I pull up the ISI Web of Knowledge impact factors right now (note, not based on something somebody remembers reading sometime somewhere), and this is what I see:

1 AM J SOCIOL - 3.262
2 AM SOCIOL REV - 2.933
3 ANNU REV SOCIOL - 2.521
4 SOCIOL HEALTH ILL - 2.169
5 SOC PROBL - 1.796
6 SOC FORCES - 1.578
7 BRIT J SOCIOL - 1.490
8 LAW SOC REV - 1.396
9 SOC NETWORKS - 1.382
10 J MARRIAGE FAM - 1.350

Just to be clear, this is only incidentally relevant to the point I was arguing, which was more about whether there was a "Big 3" or a "Big 2" followed by subfield-dependent ambiguity as to how SF was regarded relative to the top journal in that subarea. It's weird regardless how some people believe that if you question whether there is a "Big 3" or just a "Big 2," people think showing something is #3 is a knockdown counterargument. I am sure they would also argue that there are a "Big 3" of human sexes, alongside "male" and "female", if one type of intersexedness was demonstrably more common than others.

(Note: I have problems of my own with journal impact factor measures anyway--although not nearly as large as the problems I have with the equation of citation counts with the merits of individual scholars.)