Top to bottom: an expanded ranking of economics journals

ABSTRACT

In what we believe is the largest ranking of its kind in economics, this study extends the economics journal ranking literature by examining the impact of papers published in more than 550 economics journals. Based on Google Scholar citations per article to all articles published in the 15-year period from 2001 through 2015, we find that the top five journals are the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Political Economy and Journal of Economic Perspectives. Moreover, three of the American Economic Association’s newest journals – American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, and American Economic Journal: Economic Policy – are ranked among the top 30 economics journals. An expanded ranking such as that provided in this study is likely a useful tool for researchers, particularly the new ones, in navigating the field of economics.

KEYWORDS:

• Economics journals
• economics research
• rankings
• scientometrics
• Google Scholar citations

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• A10
• A14

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ In gathering an expanded set of economics journals for analysis, we sought to include those relatively well-known journals that were missed by the aforementioned ranking studies. Beyond this, we simply attempted to expand the set of relatively well-known journals to include as many other economics titles as manageable. Some of the journals that we located either did not clearly present international standard serial numbers (ISSN) on their websites, or failed to produce any data using the Publish or Perish (Harzing 2007) software.

² Although Google Scholar citations data are imperfect (e.g., see Harzing and van der Wal 2008), they are becoming more widely used in ranking studies (e.g., Lo, Wong, and Mixon 2008; Mixon and Upadhyaya 2011; Faria, Mixon, and Upadhyaya 2018) given their ease of access and analysis using Harzing (2007). Following Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos (2011), our study accounts for journal age by ignoring citations to articles that are more than 20 years old, while capturing citations per published article accounts for journal size. Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos (2011) account for journal age by ignoring citations to articles that are more than 10 years old.

³ For a given journal, j, this index is equal to j’s citation count per published paper divided by the citation count per published paper for the American Economic Review. The resulting ratio is then multiplied by 100. This aspect of our reporting procedure is similar to that used by Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos (2003, 2011). Lastly, although we do not do so due to resource constraints, the studies by Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos (2003, 2011) further adjust for self-citations and journal impact. Self-citations are ignored, and an iterative procedure following the eigenfactor methodology of Liebowitz and Palmer (1984) is used by Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos (2011) to account for ‘impact,’ as citations are adjusted for the impact that the most influential journals have on the profession.