What are the top five journals in economics? A new meta-ranking

ABSTRACT

We construct a meta-ranking of 277 economics journals based on 22 different rankings. The ranking incorporates bibliometric indicators from four different databases (Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and RePEc). We account for the different scaling of the bibliometric indicators by standardizing each ranking score. We run a principal component analysis to assign weights to each ranking. In our meta-ranking, the top five journals are given by: Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Economic Literature (JEL), Journal of Finance, and Econometrica. Additionally, leaving out the JEL as a survey journal and the finance journals in our top 10 list we confirm the perceived top five journals in the economics profession.

KEYWORDS:

• Meta-ranking
• aggregation
• Web of Science
• Scopus
• Google Scholar
• RePEc

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• A12
• A14

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ RePEc covers mainly journals and working paper series in economics. There is no coverage of the natural sciences.

² Bibliometric studies using RePEc data include Zimmermann (2013), Rath and Wohlrabe (2016b), Rath and Wohlrabe (2016a), and Sommer and Wohlrabe (2017).

³ Pons-Novell and Tirado-Fabregat (2010) investigated the impact of country-specific journals which are not listed in the JCR.

⁴ Chang, Maasoumi, and McAleer (2016) label these scores as Research Assessment Measures.

⁵ http://www.scimagojr.com/ and http://www.journalmetrics.com/.

⁶ It is available at http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm.

⁷ www.repec.org.

⁸ The detailed results of the PCA are available from the authors upon request.