Academic journal evaluation is one of the important issues in journal research field． Traditional methods of data envelopment analysis are based on self-evaluation when evaluating the performance of academic journals． Without peer-evaluation，the evaluation result might be easily exaggerated． This paper studies the problem under the non-cooperative game framework by using data envelopment analysis /assurance region ( DEA/AＲ) game cross efficiency method，and 17 Chinese sci-tech core journals are selected as an illustrative example． The results show that: 1) Some academic journals with high industry influence have non-ideal evaluation results: although their outputs are ideal，their published papers are non-ideal． 2) The evaluation values of academic journals could be increasing，unchanged，decreasing with the change of the preference of index weights． 3) The self-citeing of journals have three cases: excessive，moderate and insufficient． The evaluation result can provide a powerful decision reference for journal assistants to improve the competitiveness of journals．