Abstract:

This study develops a flexible, citations‐adjusted ranking technique that allows a specified set

of journals to be evaluated using a wide range of alternative criteria. As a result, the set of

evaluated journals is not constrained to be identical to the set of evaluating journals. We also

draw a critical distinction between the influence of a journal and the influence of a journal

article, with the latter concept arguably being more relevant for potential contributors and

those who evaluate research productivity. The list of top economics journals changes

noticeably when one examines citations in the social science and policy literatures, and when

one measures citations, either within or outside economics, on a per‐article basis rather than in

total. The changes in rankings are due to the relatively broad interest in applied

microeconomics and economic development, to differences in the relative importance that

different literatures assign to theoretical and empirical contributions, and to the lack of a

systematic effect of journal size on average influence per article. As a related observation on

interdisciplinary communications, we confirm other researchers’ conclusions that economics is

more self‐contained than almost any other social science discipline, while finding,

nevertheless, that economics draws knowledge from a range of other disciplines.

JEL Classifications: A10, A12

Keywords: economics journals, social sciences journals, policy journals, rankings, citations,

research productivity, interdisciplinary communications.

Yolanda Kodrzycki is a Senior Economist and Policy Advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Her email

address is yolanda.kodrzycki@bos.frb.org. Pingkang Yu is a former Policy Analyst and Advisor at the Federal

Reserve Bank of Boston. His email address is Pingkang_Yu@yahoo.com.

This paper, which may be revised, is available on the web site of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston at

http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/wp/index.htm.

The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal

Reserve Bank of Boston or the Federal Reserve System.

We are grateful for the excellent research assistance provided by Nelson Gerew, Joyce Hannan, Erin Lindsay, and,

most extensively, James Dang. We acknowledge receiving valuable advice and comments on previous drafts from

our colleagues at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, particularly Chris Foote, Jeff Fuhrer, Fabià Gumbau‐Brisa,

Jane Katz, and Paul Willen.

This version: September 9, 2005

1. Introduction

For at least the past two decades, economists have devoted serious effort to ranking

economics journals based on their intellectual influence. Liebowitz and Palmer (1984) made

seminal contributions by analyzing a large number of economics journals, controlling for

differences in their size and age, and adjusting citation counts by a measure of the influence of

the citing journals. Key studies following in this vein include Laband and Piette (1994) and

Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos (2003). In addition to providing insights on the relative

standings of journals in the economics profession, such evaluations have become instrumental

in evaluating the research productivity of academic departments and individual scholars.

Despite their various innovations, studies have continued to assess economics journals

according to how frequently they cite one another, in line with the framework proposed by

Liebowitz and Palmer (p. 82):

[E]conomists, being a rather narrow‐minded and self‐centered group, are

probably more concerned with a journal’s impact on the economics profession

[than on other disciplines]. And even within the discipline, a journal’s impact on

highly influential journals is probably of greater value than its impact on less

influential journals.

While this assumption may produce the appropriate methodology for some purposes, it is not

suitable for analyzing the broader influence of economics journals. Nor does it produce

rankings that address the varying needs of different researchers within economics.

The current study extends the literature on journal rankings by developing a flexible,

citations‐adjusted ranking technique that allows a specified set of journals to be evaluated using

a wide range of alternative criteria. As a result, the set of evaluated journals is not constrained to

be identical to the set of evaluating journals. While the methodology is quite general, specific

applications developed in the study rank economics journals according to their influence on the

social science literature as well as on policy, as measured by citations in policy‐oriented

journals.

This research is motivated in part by intellectual curiosity: Economists may be interested

in knowing whether the journals they hold in highest esteem are the same as or different from

the ones that other social scientists use in their evaluation of economic research. In addition, the

research is intended to guide publication decisions and evaluations of journals. For example,

scholars may seek a more systematic understanding of the channels through which economic

research is disseminated to other fields, a topic explored in Pieters and Baumgartner (2002). We

believe this need to be particularly acute with respect to contributions in applied

microeconomics. In contrast to monetary policy and international finance—subjects that are

almost exclusively the province of economists—topics such as housing, health care, and

regulation are likely to be of interest to a diverse range of scholars and policymakers outside the

economics field. Similarly, economists pursuing cross‐disciplinary research currently lack

systematic evidence on where to submit their papers to maximize their influence. Existing

studies are unable to provide guidance on whether such research is likely to be more influential

if targeted to an economics periodical, or to a publication that attracts a more diverse set of

readers.

Most of the literature on economics journals focuses on a small set of core journals or

uses the definitions of economics contained in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and its predecessor

databases to examine a greater number of journals. For purposes of this study, we are interested

in identifying as comprehensive a list as possible of journals whose articles extensively use

concepts and methodologies that are central to economics, so as to draw appropriate

boundaries between economics and other fields. We therefore inspect the content of journals in

order to determine their field. This approach is inherently subjective, but it offers advantages

relative to the existing literature. By including Industrial and Labor Relations Review, for example,

as well as other journals with significant economics content, we both: 1) compare the influence

of these journals to the influence of the journals encompassed by the JCR definition of

economics, and 2) assign a positive weight to any citations in these journals to articles appearing

in the economics literature. Other researchers have lamented the exclusion of selected journals

from the JCR list but have not attempted to measure their influence or to develop an alternative

list of economics journals. Another advantage of using a content‐driven definition of economics

is that this approach enables us to assess how various characteristics of journals, such as their

relative emphasis on theory versus applications, tend systematically to influence rankings.

Finally, a content‐based approach is essential in examining the influence of economics on the

field of policy, which, to our knowledge, has not been defined comprehensively by any other

study examining journals.

The next section of the paper reviews previous research on the influence of economics

journals on their own and other fields. Section 3 details the methodologies for ranking

economics journals according to citations in other economics journals, in economics and all

other social sciences journals, and in any subset of social sciences journals. In addition to

focusing on different bodies of citations, we also draw a critical distinction between the

influence of a journal and the influence of a journal article. While the influence of journal editors

may be judged by the total numbers of references to their journal as a whole, the more relevant

statistic for potential contributors is based on the number of times an average article is cited.

Although other authors have made adjustments for size of journal, we believe that per‐article

measures are more meaningful than the per‐page or per‐character measures that have been

developed to date. Section 4 describes in conceptual terms our content‐driven definitions of

economics and policy analysis, then indicates the process by which these definitions were

applied in the context of the JCR database. Section 5 presents results and compares these

findings to those of previous studies. It also provides a regression‐based assessment of whether

journal content, field, and size have systematic effects on journal rankings. Section 6 concludes

by summarizing the insights gleaned from developing these various new approaches to

identifying and ranking economics journals.

2. Previous Literature on Economics and Its Relationship to Other Social

    Sciences

Existing studies of economics journals have used convenient but rather restrictive

definitions of the field. This focus may have resulted in incorrect rankings of journals for certain

purposes, as well as some misleading conclusions about the connections between economics

and the other social sciences.

2.1 Effects of Definitions on Journal Rankings

As a conceptual matter, the field of economics could be considered quite large. The

EconLit database maintained by the American Economic Association includes roughly 1,000

journals. Operationally, however, ranking studies restrict themselves to the publications

encompassed by Journal Citation Reports because the Reports are the only extensive source of

citation information. JCR encompasses over 1,700 social sciences publications. Its economics

category has about 160 journals.

It is well known within the literature that focusing on economics as defined in JCR

results in the omission of certain journals that academic economists hold in high regard but that

are scattered among other JCR social science categories.2 JCR economics excludes some

relatively prominent publication outlets in the areas of labor, environmental studies, public

economics, health care, political science, demography, law, and finance, as well as some that

focus on regions outside the United States. Journals outside the JCR economics category figure

prominently in the publications records of leading academic economists.

The standard approach of restricting the list of citing journals to be the same as the list of

cited journals also results in inherent biases in creating rankings. Not surprisingly, it raises the

rankings for some economics journals that are likely to be read almost exclusively by

economists.4 It also misses the influence that economists might have on other fields of

scholarship.

1. Liebowitz and Palmer (1984) initially considered all the journals listed in the Journal of Economic Literature. However,

      their rankings focused on the 107 journals in the economics category of the Social Science Citation Index, the former

      name for the database containing journal citations. The term Social Sciences Citation Index is now used for the database

     of references to particular articles within journals.

2.  See, for example, Davis (1998) and García‐Castrillo, Montañés, and Sanz‐Gracia (1992).

3.  We examined the publications outlets for two leading university economics departments in the United States over

     the most recent five‐year period. For each department, our Internet searches indicated that the faculty had published

     in approximately 130 different journals. In each case, about 50 of these journals are found in the economics part of

     JCR, about 20 to 30 are found in other social science categories, and the remainder do not appear to be encompassed

     by the social sciences segment of JCR.

     4 For example, a comparison of columns 2 and 3 of Table 1 in Liebowitz and Palmer (1984) indicates that, compared

     with other SSCI‐defined economics journals, Journal of Monetary Economics and International Economic Review are cited.

2.2 Perceptions of Economics Journals by Other Fields and Vice Versa

A related literature pertaining to linkages between economics and other fields uses

cross‐citations both to define fields and to determine the strength and directions of information

flow between fields. Although some studies compare numbers of citations across journals, none,

to our knowledge, implements iterative, impact‐adjusted rankings of economics journals.

Leydesdorff (2004) considers the pattern of cross‐citations among all social sciences

journals in JCR, and he uses this pattern to define distinct subject areas. He finds that linkages

among social sciences journals are looser than among natural sciences journals. Social science

scholars differ both in the issues they study and in the methods they use (for example,

quantitative versus qualitative analysis), thereby producing not only less dense patterns of

cross‐citations within fields but also greater uncertainty in drawing boundaries between fields.

Pieters and Baumgartner (2002) consider citation patterns within economics and

between economics and other disciplines. Their sample consists of 42 economics journals with

high impact,5 five prominent journals from each of nine social science and business disciplines

(anthropology, political science, psychology, sociology, accounting, finance, management,

marketing, and management information systems/operations research), and five journals

“whose aim is to bridge economics with the sister disciplines.”6 They find that these other

disciplines draw a significant share of their interdisciplinary knowledge from economics, but

that economics builds only slightly on the other disciplines, apart from finance. Within

economics, Pieters and Baumgartner identify seven separate clusters and find that all journal.

fairly heavily by social sciences journals, but they rise to the top ten in citations by other SSCI economics journals. By

contrast, several journals in the fields of law, agriculture, and demography—which SSCI includes in its economics

category but which probably have a significant readership among scholars in other disciplines—fall out of the

highest ranks as a result of restricting citations to SSCI economics journals. Unfortunately, this evidence in Liebowitz

and Palmer cannot be interpreted as simply reflecting broad versus narrow citations because column 3 also

introduces citations‐based weights for journals within SSCI economics.

5 They base their choices on the “impact factor” as calculated by the SSCI, which refers to the number of citations

within two years of publication. Although this impact is based on citations in all of the social sciences, Pieters and

Baumgartner restrict their list to the journals in the SSCI economics category, so essentially they consider a subset of

the journals evaluated by Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos (2003).

6 Pieters and Baumgartner (2002) select the following journals to represent interdisciplinary studies: American Journal

of Economics and Sociology, Economics and Philosophy, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Economic

Psychology, and Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

clusters make at least one‐half of their citations to the general interest group, while the general

interest group draws heavily from the theory and method cluster but not from the other, more

applied clusters. Finally, based on their sample, the authors conclude that communication

between economics and other disciplines occurs via the central, most influential journals within

economics rather than through more applied or explicitly interdisciplinary journals.

MacRae and Feller (1998) and Reuter and Smith‐Ready (2002) perform exercises similar

to those in Pieters and Baumgartner (2002), but focus on ties between economics and policy, and

consider even fewer journals. They conclude that policy‐related research draws on the

economics discipline, but that flows in the other direction are comparatively rare.

3. Alternative Approaches to Ranking Journals

As the previous section indicates, the literature on journal rankings has used the JCR

definition of economics to determine both the list of journals to be ranked and the set of

citations used for ranking. Studies examining how different fields influence one another have

either selected key journals to represent economics or drawn from the JCR list, but they have

not ranked journals. Our study uses new approaches to construct impact‐adjusted rankings

(presented in this section) and to classify journals (Section 4).

Before describing these approaches, it is worth noting that the impact‐adjusted ranking

method inherently requires publications to be both a citing source and a cited source to enter

the database of citations. As pointed out by other authors, articles in economics journals are

referenced in books, reports, newspapers, and various other communications channels.7

Although this study uses what we believe to be a more appropriate definition of economics

journals and compares the rankings for these journals using alternative bodies of citing

literature, it follows the existing literature in excluding citations outside of scholarly journals,

because we continue to lack measures of how often these publications cite scholarly journals.

Several studies have explored alternatives to journal citations. For example, Liner (2002) examined the frequency

with which economics journals are cited in economics textbooks, and Dusansky and Vernon (1998) used surveys to

rank the research productivity of economists or economics departments.

3.1 Evaluation Criteria

As in the literature starting with Liebowitz and Palmer (1984) and continuing through

Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos (2003), the approach used in this paper weights citations

according to the influence of the citing journal and computes this influence by applying an

iterative process. In the end, journals that are themselves cited heavily, or that are cited in other

journals that are cited heavily, rank higher than journals that draw fewer citations or that tend

to be cited in less influential journals. Following the thrust of the literature, we exclude selfcitations

in computing rankings and we control for journal age by selecting an eight‐year period

for citations, so as not to favor journals that have a long publications history.

Our main innovation comes in comparing rankings that result from considering

different sets of citing journals. Evaluating economics journals according to their influence

within economics produces the within‐discipline rankings. Essentially, this ranking process

replicates the exercises in the Liebowitz and Palmer, Laband and Piette, and Kalaitzidakis‐

Mamuneas‐Stengos papers, using more recent data and our own refined selection of economics

journals. It largely serves as a base case to which our other approaches are compared, as it can

be expected to yield a list of highly influential journals that is similar to what previous studies

have found.

In a broader context, we rank economics journals according to their adjusted impact on

the social sciences. The iterative, impact‐adjustment procedures are employed using all of the

social science periodicals, each of which is ranked by its overall adjusted impact among the

universe of social science periodicals in the JCR database.

Our final method ranks economics journals according to their influence on a targeted

subset of social sciences journals, in this case, on policy journals. This ranking may suit the

interest of scholars interested in reading or writing for economics journals that have substantial

Self‐citations refer to cases in which articles in a given journal cite other articles published in the same journal.

Laband and Piette (1994) provided the initial arguments in favor of excluding self‐citations. Whatever its merits, this

practice should reduce the relative influence of journals publishing comparatively large numbers of articles and of

journals in comparatively large fields. However, in a discipline with many competing journals, the effects of

excluding self‐citations are minor. Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos (2003) found that the identity and relative

standings of the top five economics journals remain unchanged whether or not self‐citations are included, and the list

of the top twenty economics journals is virtually identical under the two sets of computations. Self‐citations matter

even less when citations outside of the discipline whose journals are being ranked are considered.

influence on policy analysis and research, and, ultimately, on policymaking. The ranking of an

economics journal according to this method depends on the frequency of citations of its articles

in the specified subset of social science journals, as well as on the rankings of these journals as

determined by their citations among all social science journals. We do not ex ante rule out the

possibility that a journal could fall into both the economics and the policy categories. In

practice, different definitions of “policy” provide different degrees of overlap.

Acknowledging the fact that an individual author, when submitting a research paper,

tends to pay more attention to maximizing the impact of his or her own cited work than to the

impact of the journal as a whole, in each of the above three methods we also adjust by the

number of articles published in each journal, thereby generating three additional rankings of

journals according to their influence per article. Larger journals contain more articles, so they

tend to attract more citations. The impact‐per‐article ranking is intended to filter out the size

effect of a journal in a meaningful way, thus providing journal contributors (as well as those

who evaluate their scholarly productivity) a fair reference.

3.2 Within‐Discipline Rankings: Economics Journals Evaluated by Influence on

      Other Economics Journals

Our methodology is quite general, but to fix ideas, we introduce the following notation,

characterizing the relationships among three sets of journals :

Let E ⊂ S, P ⊂ S, And E ∩ P ≥ 0

where E= Economics journals

P= Policy journals

It has been common practice in previous studies to provide an additional ranking based on impact per character

[Liebowitz and Palmer (1984), Laband and Piette (1994), Kalaitzidakis, and Mamuneas, and Stengos (2003)] or on

“adjusted page” [Coupé (n.d.), Hirsch, Austin, Brooks, and Moore (1984) and Scott and Mitias (1996)]. As Laband and

Piette explain, some journals have more notes, comments, replies, and short articles than others. Notes, comments,

and replies tend to be the final contributions to formal scholarly discussions and therefore attract few citations. Short

articles, as well, are deemed to be cited less than full‐length articles. However, the practices used have limited the

number of journals entered into the analysis because of the laborious work of counting characters (108 journals in

Liebowitz and Palmer, 71 in Laband and Piette, 92 in Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos, and far fewer in other

studies). Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos included per‐article calculations in their sensitivity analysis, but this

was not their central method used to rank economics departments.

S= Social Science journals.

The three approaches discussed in this study can be thought of as E evaluated by citations in E

(within‐discipline rankings), E evaluated by citations in S (broad rankings), and E evaluated by

citations in P (targeted rankings).

The iterative procedure introduced by Liebowitz and Palmer (1984) includes two major

steps. The initial step calculates the number of times each economics journal is cited by other

economics journals. Then, these citation counts are rescaled to 100, representing the number of

citations to the most cited journal. In this first step, citations in all journals receive equal weight.

Once the initial adjusted impact of each journal is computed, it is used in the next

iteration to weight the citations that this journal provides to the other journals. The tth iteration

of this procedure is represented as follows.

In all specifications, Cij is set equal to zero in the case of j = i, so as to exclude self‐citations.

The equivalent expression for Q in Liebowitz and Palmer (1984) includes an additional term denoting the total

number of citations each citing journal receives from all of the social sciences journals. Excluding this term (as we do),

or substituting arbitrary non‐negative numbers, does not affect the final rankings of economics journals when the

rankings are based solely on impact within economics.

    t  = number of iterations

Qi,t = weighted citations index for journal i after the tth iteration

Ii,t = adjusted impact for journal i after the tth iteration.12

3.3 Broad Context Rankings: Economics Journals Evaluated by Influence on Social

      Sciences Journals

Equations for the social sciences ranking are the same as those for the within‐economics

ranking, except that the number of journals in the calculation (n) refers to the total number of

social science journals in the database instead of just the economics journals.

3.4 Targeted Context Rankings: Economics Journals Evaluated by Influence on

      Policy Journals

The targeted context ranking, which provides an evaluation of economics journals

according to their impact on policy journals, starts by ranking all of the social science journals in

the database according to their overall impact among social sciences. This part of the calculation

follows the same procedure as in the broad context rankings, and can be represented as follows.

After the process converges, we have an adjusted impact Ij,t representing the journal’s

overall influence on the universe of social sciences journals. Since policy journals are a subset of

social science journals, the adjusted impact Ij,t of each policy journal can be used as a weight to

This study uses 15 iterations. The number of iterations needed to reach convergence varies with the number of

journals included in the computations. We find that 15 iterations are more than enough for calculating economicsimpact

rankings but just about sufficient for the broad‐context rankings.

3.5 Rankings of Journals by Influence per Article

The calculation of a journal’s ranking by its influence per article follows the same

equations as above for each of the three types of ranking exercises, except that the number of

citations from one journal to another is adjusted by the number of articles published in the cited

journal. That is, C is replaced by a new variable c.

4. Definitions of Economics and Policy Journals

Our source for citations is the 2003 Social Science Edition of Journal Citation Reports,

which reports the number of times that journal articles appearing in 2003 cited articles

appearing in other entities. We restrict our analysis to citations of journal articles published

between 1996 and 2003, thereby excluding any entries in publications other than scholarly

journals or in scholarly journals prior to 2003 . Our study encompasses the 1,714 social sciences

journals that both provided and received citations.13 To implement our within‐discipline and

targeted context rankings, we use new definitions of the economics and policy‐related fields.

 

4.1 Defining Economics Journals: Concepts

The 2003 social science edition of JCR provides statistics for 5,936 citing entities and 76,324 cited entities.

We identify a journal’s disciplinary origin by inspecting the content of its articles. An

article is deemed to be an economics article if economic concepts (for example, prices, budget

constraints, business cycles, capital formation) predominate and if the analysis draws on

economic methodology essentially and extensively. A journal’s disciplinary origin depends on

the fraction of its articles that meet these criteria.

This definition of economics seems similar to the approach taken to produce the JCR

category, so it is likely to result in a list of journals that has significant overlap with the lists

used in previous studies. However, as mentioned above, the JCR economics list has been

criticized by other authors. Furthermore, the criteria motivating the JCR classifications are not

codified, perhaps resulting in some inconsistencies across journals or over time, and journals

are not recodified if their content changes or becomes more or less closely linked to economics.

We believe there is merit in specifying the methodology for categorizing journals, as well as in

taking a fresh look at the economics literature rather than simply identifying a handful of

classifications that are open to question because of the lack of transparency of the methodology

used.

4.2 Defining Policy Journals: Concepts

The citations literature offers examples of policy journals and supports the view that

“policy” is a distinct literature that is closer to policymaking than to economics or other social

sciences disciplines. However, it does not develop a comprehensive definition of what

constitutes a policy journal. For purposes of this study, we draw on concepts developed in

Hanushek (1990), which distinguishes between disciplinary research that has policy

implications but flows directly from economics or another distinct social sciences field, on the

one hand, and policy research, which is a more applied branch of the social sciences, (p. 291):

[P]olicy research focuses directly on policy issues. It is similar to disciplinary

research in that it gives heavy weight to hypothesis formulation, to rigorous

analysis, and to agreed upon statistical standards of evidence. It differs, however,

in that its objective is to produce policy implications that have some hope or

expectation of being taken seriously.

As in the case of defining our economics category, we determine whether a journal is a

policy‐oriented journal by the content of its articles. Individual articles constitute policy

research if they meet Hanushek’s definition, present clear recommendations for policy, and are

written in a manner and language appealing to decision makers. Alternatively, they constitute

disciplinary research, in which case they may have some bearing on contemporary issues or the

formulation of public sector decision‐making, but do not appear to be motivated by specific

policy choices and do not offer findings on specific proposals under consideration by

policymaking bodies.

The categories “policy research” and “disciplinary research with policy implications”

implicitly suggest different ways in which academic studies may influence policymaking, but

little if any scientific evidence exists on these channels. Hansen (1991) posits that different types

of writing affect policymaking with different lags. Shulock (1999) confirms the existence of a

link between policy evaluation and policy formulation by studying citations that appear in

Congressional committee reports, but she does not distinguish between the types of research

described by Hanushek, or between the rigorous analysis of policy issues that characterizes

research and the mere presentation of data relevant to such analysis. Our content‐based

approach does not attempt to resolve questions about which inputs are used in making policy,

but it permits the use of sensitivity analysis to determine how the definition of policy‐related

research affects the size of the policy literature and rankings of economics journals.

4.3 Selection of Journals for Content Analysis

The development of content‐based lists of economics and policy journals consists of two

stages: selecting groups of journals that appear most likely to cite journals in the JCR economics

category, and then inspecting the content of individual journals from these groups to determine

Hanushek goes on to distinguish a third type of research called “policy analysis” that is directly linked to the

political process and is performed under a tight timetable for a client with specific questions concerning a policy

proposal. Policy analysis is disseminated in the form of memos, reports, and testimony, as opposed to being

published in scholarly journals.

the degree to which they satisfy our conceptual definitions of economics and policy. This

section describes the first stage, which was based on analysis of cross‐citations between journals

in the JCR economics category and the other 53 social sciences journal categories, and it offers

several intermediate findings concerning interdisciplinary communications.

Extending the unidirectional utilization index used by MacRae and Feller (1998) to

measure knowledge flows between individual journals, we developed similar indexes to

summarize such flows across groups of journals. The utilization index Uij is a measure of the

intensity of citations from journals in category i to journals in category j, and is adjusted so as to

be invariant to the sizes of the two literatures.

When computing the number of within‐category citations (j = i), we include journal selfcitations

so as to measure the full extent to which a discipline is self‐contained as opposed to

drawing from other literatures.

A portion of the 54‐by‐54 matrix of utilization indexes is presented in Table 1. The first

column refers to the intensity with which each of the social sciences cites itself, based on the JCR

definitions of these disciplines. Judging by a within‐discipline utilization index of .77,

economics is more self‐contained than the other categories shown, a finding that is consistent

with previous research.15 However, some other disciplines do feed noticeably into JCR

economics, including social sciences mathematics methods and finance, followed by industrial

relations and labor, planning and development, and environmental studies (column 2). The

Pieters and Baumgartner (2002) study did not address the information flows from the

mathematical literature in other social science disciplines to economics, nor those in any of the

Among all the social sciences, we find that only law is more self‐contained than economics.

other listed categories except finance and political science. More generally, the JCR‐based

literature has not recognized that economics journals cite journals in the planning and

development and environmental studies categories as frequently as they cite journals in the

labor and industrial relations category.

Based on utilization indexes, the categories that draw contributions from JCR economics

most heavily are (in order of impact of the economics category): finance, environmental studies,

planning and development, urban studies, industrial relations and labor, management,

business, education and educational research, and public administration (column 3). We

selected these nine JCR categories for further investigation.

Table 1 Utilization Indexes for Selected Journal Citation Reports Categories

                                                                               (1)                           (2)                        (3)

Citing Same           Cited By              Citting

Cited by Citing        Economics          Economics

Economics                                                              .77                         .77                     .77

Business, Finance                                                    .58                         .27                     .27

Environmental Studies                                              .47                         .08                    .18

Planning and Development                                       .32                         .08                     .13

Urban Studies                                                          .48                        .06                     .09

Industrial Relations and Labor                                  .33                         .08                     08

Management                                                            .61                        .03                     .07

Business                                                                  .57                        .04                      .07

Education and Educational Research                        .59                        .01                      .07

Public Administration                                               .35                         .01                     .05

Political Science                                                       .53                         .04                     .03

Social Sciences Mathematical Methods                    .37                         .31                     .03

History of Social Science                                         .36                         .05                     .00

Source: Authors’ calculations using 2003 Social Science Edition of Journal Citation Reports

From each category, we initially selected journals that appeared most connected to the

economics literature, judging by title, overall number of citations to journals in the economics

category, and share of total citations given to economics. Using these criteria, we selected 119

out of the 410 journals in the nine categories for further inspection.

We also selected for further review 161 of the 169 journals in the economics category,

excluding those that are in written in a language other than English or are heavily devoted to

book reviews, current events, broad‐ranging prognostications, and the like. The eight excluded

journals were either difficult to categorize under the content rating scheme described in the next

section, or were otherwise deemed highly unlikely to be selected for inclusion in our economics

and policy categories.

4.4 Content Ratings

Producing the content ratings was a labor‐intensive process. We compiled the mission

statements and the titles and abstracts of 20 recent articles from each of the 280 journals under

consideration. Mission statements generally describe the major areas the journals intend to

cover and the types of audience the journals intend to serve, with some offering more

information than others. Not every journal has a mission statement, and some mission

statements are more reflective of editorial directions than of actual content. For these reasons,

the content ratings were based primarily on inspecting individual articles, with the mission

statements serving as supplemental information. In some circumstances, full texts of articles

were downloaded for review if the titles and abstracts were not sufficient to establish their

ratings. The ratings for journals were based on aggregations of ratings for individual articles.

The rating scheme is illustrated in Chart 1. Each article is examined from three aspects:

substance, disciplinary origin, and sophistication/technicality. Substance is a major category

that, as a first cut, distinguishes articles according to whether or not they represent original

research. Excluded from original research are pieces that present news or history without

contributing noticeably to the development of economic thought or methods. This inspection of

articles served to eliminate from the rankings additional journals that are oriented toward

interpretive writings as opposed to original research.

The eight excluded journals are Journal of Economic Literature, Desarrollo Economico‐Revista De Ciencias Sociales,

Ekonomiska Samfundets Tidskrift, Futures, Journal of Economic Education, Post‐Soviet Geography and Economics, Revue D’

Etudes Comparatives Est‐Ouest, and Trimestre Economico. The Journal of Economic Literature ranked between 17th and 20th

in the Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, Stengos (2003) study, and arguably would have ranked highly had it been

considered in our study. We chose to treat JEL as being in a “category of its own.” Until 2000, it was much more

heavily devoted to book reviews and overviews of new books and periodicals than to articles based on original

research. Furthermore, we conjecture that many economists use JEL to develop their research plans, so that its

influence is substantially underestimated by counting formal citations.

Original research includes both disciplinary research and policy research, concepts

explained in Section 4.2. Disciplinary research is further broken down into two types,

theoretical or primarily focused on development of mathematical techniques, and empirical or

applied.

The disciplinary origin category indicates how closely related the article’s subject matter

and methodology are to economics. Sophistication indicates the degree to which the article

targets a highly technical or academic audience. Disciplinary origin and sophistication are each

scored at 0, 1, or 2. For example, the ratings consider finance, management, and mathematics to

be closer to economics (and therefore rated 1) than disciplines such as political science,

anthropology, and philosophy (rated 0). On the other hand, the scoring for a variety of other

fields such as urban, health care, and environmental studies depends on the analytical methods

and topics contained in the article. For sophistication, as examples, Rand Journal and Quarterly

Journal of Economics score 2, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity and Journal of Economic

Perspectives score 1, and Housing Policy Debate and World Development are in the least technical

category among the social sciences journals considered.

In summary, then, each article is characterized by six variables—four dummy variables

from the substance category plus one each denoting disciplinary origin and sophistication, with

values of 0, 1, or 2. The ratings were calculated by a member of the research team using

extensive written instructions, and they were cross‐checked for accuracy and consistency by at

least one other member of the team.

A journal’s ratings for the same six variables are generated by aggregating the scores of

its articles, and they range from 0 to 2. For the four variables in the substance category, a journal

is scored 2 if more than one‐third of its articles are scored 1 for the same variable, 1 if between

one‐tenth and one‐third of its articles are scored 1 for the variable, and 0 if fewer than one‐tenth

of its articles are scored 1. By these rules, journals exemplifying disciplinary research may be

classified as either theoretical/mathematical or empirical/applied, or both. For example, Journal

of Economic Dynamics and Control and Journal of Econometrics are highly theoretical/mathematical

but not highly empirical, while Journal of Human Resources and Review of Economics and Statistics

are highly empirical/applied but not highly theoretical. As a result of their wide‐ranging mix of

articles, American Economic Review and Economics Letters score 2 in both categories.

The categories “disciplinary research with policy implications” and “policy research”

are mutually exclusive for individual articles, but some journals, such as Brookings Papers on

Economic Activity and Housing Policy Debate, have more than one‐third of their articles in each

category. We find, on the other hand, that Journal of Health Economics specializes in disciplinary

research with policy implications, while IDS Bulletin—Institute of Development Studies

concentrates on policy research. The journal scores for disciplinary origin and sophistication

The 10‐page instruction manual was developed by James Dang and further modified on the basis of a pilot experiment.

simply take the average scores of the same variables for their articles, rounded to the nearest

integer.

For the analyses presented below, we defined economics journals as those with

disciplinary origin equal to 2, meaning that more than one‐third of the articles rely essentially

and extensively on economics. This definition of the economics literature produces a list of

journals that is much closer to what was used in previous studies than would a definition also

encompassing journals with a lower score for disciplinary origin. We rank 178 economics

journals in total, of which 140 are drawn from the 164 journals in the economics category in JCR,

and 38 are drawn from the other nine JCR categories.

For the policy journals category, we included all policy research journals (those with

values greater than 0), plus not‐highly‐sophisticated/technical journals (those with values less

than 2) with more than one‐third of their articles exemplifying disciplinary research with policy

implications (disciplinary research with policy implications equal to 2). This yields 85 policy

journals in total, of which 46 journals are considered to be both economics journals and policy

journals (See Chart 2 and Appendix Table 1).19 In our view, the resulting list of policy journals

is sufficiently different from our list of economics journals so as potentially to provide a

different assessment from the standard methodology. At the same time, the process to select

journals for content analysis (as described in Section 4.3) narrows the list of policy journals to

those that are at least somewhat connected to the economics literature. Therefore, our targeted

context rankings have the potential to be quite different from our rankings that include citations

from the entire social sciences literature.

For the journals exemplifying disciplinary research with policy implications, including journals with sophistication

equal to 2 would produce a set of policy journals with much more overlap with our economics category. The

resulting ranking would be very similar to our within‐discipline rankings. At the other extreme, restricting

sophistication to 0 would yield only a tiny sample.

5. Results

Table 2 presents the economics journal rankings according to the three methodologies,

both for the journal as a whole and per article. Consider first the results using each journal’s

total impact‐weighted citations, unadjusted for the number of articles. As expected, the list of

journals with very high influence within the economics discipline generally agrees with the

apparent consensus of the economics profession, as well as with previous studies. For example,

eight of the top ten journals also appear in the top ten in Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos

(2003) for the comparable exercise, and the remaining two journals are ranked 12th and 13th in

that study (KMS Table 1, column 4).

5.1 Influence of Economics Journals outside Economics

The overall‐impact rankings differ markedly from the economics‐impact rankings. Three

health economics journals rise to the top, although two general‐interest economics journals,

American Economic Review and Quarterly Journal of Economics, remain in the top five. Several

journals specializing in behavioral economics and decision‐making move to the upper ranks, as

do some journals concentrating on labor, housing, and development economics. Rand Journal of

Economics

Economics moves up from number 19 in influence on economics to number 10 in influence on all

social sciences. Most impressively, Journal of Media Economics, which publishes articles on

communications technology and information, leaps from 177 to 22, and Journal of Social Policy

goes from 160 to 17 in the rankings.

As compared with the economics‐impact rankings, the overall‐impact rankings give

greater prominence to journals with comparatively broad accessibility. For example, World

Development, Monthly Labor Review, and Journal of Policy Analysis and Management appear in the

top twenty‐five by overall impact. Two prestigious, technically‐oriented publications in the

areas of monetary economics and financial institutions, Journal of Monetary Economics and

Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, fall considerably in the rankings relative to their rankings

based on economics impact.

Some exceptions exist to the positive association between overall‐impact rankings and

accessibility. Econometrica and Journal of Econometrics remain highly influential according to their

overall impact on the social sciences. This finding suggests that econometrics, as a tool, has been

widely applied across the whole spectrum of social sciences, and not just in economics.

Since economics journals represent only a small fraction of the universe of social science

journals, it is plausible that the overall‐impact rankings of economics journals can be explained

largely by their impact outside the economics discipline. This assumption is confirmed by the

strong correlation (0.90) between the economics‐impact rankings with the rankings of

economics journals according to their influence on non‐economics journals, which we calculated

using a method similar to the one used to calculate the policy‐impact rankings. Among the 20

most highly rated journals within economics, Journal of International Economics and International

Economic Review are cited the least frequently (or in the least prestigious publications) in the

social sciences literature as a whole.

The policy‐impact rankings of economics journals are similar to the economics‐impact

rankings in some respects. Prestigious economics journals such as American Economic Review,

Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Econometrica, and Journal of Economic

Perspectives continue to appear in the top ten according to policy impact. This may be partially

attributable to the selection of policy journals, all of which are somewhat economics‐relevant

and more than half of which overlap with economics journals. Leading economics journals

presumably have stronger influence on these types of policy journals than on policy‐oriented

social science journals in general.

On the other hand, policy‐impact rankings for many other journals differ substantially

from their economics‐impact rankings. Theoretical journals, especially those that are highly

mathematical, such as Journal of Economic Theory and Economic Theory, drop significantly in the

policy‐impact rankings. Nevertheless, Econometrica, Journal of Econometrics, and Review of

Economics and Statistics remain nearly as highly ranked as they are within economics.

Moving up most notably in the policy‐impact rankings are journals in the fields of

development economics, urban and regional economics, agricultural economics, and labor

economics. Examples of such journals appearing in the top 25 include American Journal of

Agricultural Economics, Housing Policy Debate, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of

Development Studies, Journal of Human Resources, and World Development. Journal of Health

Economics remains in the top three, but the two other health economics journals at the very top

in the overall‐impact rankings now slide somewhat.

While some policy research journals found in our economics list such as Journal of Policy

Analysis and Management and Journal of Social Policy move up smartly in going from the

economics‐impact rankings to the policy‐impact rankings, most of the others in this category

fall in the standings. This finding suggests that policy research journals tend to draw

contributions from highly ranked economics journals or economics journals with broad policy

implications, while citing each other less often.

5.2 Influence per Article

Although journals tend to promote themselves by providing measures of their

readership or citations, researchers should be interested in whether a typical article published in

one journal has more or less influence than a typical article published in another. In many cases,

rankings by adjusted impact‐per‐article are similar to those already discussed. In the withineconomics

approach, per‐article rankings and all‐articles journal rankings are strongly

correlated (0.95). The most noteworthy exceptions are the journals that publish only small

number of articles but manage to achieve relatively high influence for the journal as a whole,

such as NBER Macroeconomics Annual, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, and Journal of

Economic Growth. According to JCR, these journals published only 36, 102 and 73 articles,

respectively, in the 1996‐to‐2003 study period, and they rank numbers 1, 3, and 5, respectively,

in our per‐article rankings. American Economic Review, which published more than one thousand

articles in the study period, remains in the top ten. However, another large journal, Economics

Letters, falls from 24 to 70, once its specialization in very short pieces is taken into account.

Per‐article rankings differ more from total‐articles rankings under the overall‐impact

approach. Journal of Law and Economics achieves the top spot. Journals in health economics and

development, some of which attain much greater prominence in the overall‐impact than in the

The authors of articles appearing in NBER Macroeconomics Annual and Brookings Papers on Economic Activity

are selected by the editors of these publications rather than being chosen from among a pool of submissions. Their

high rankings may be irrelevant for researchers deciding where to submit their papers but they remain relevant for

those who evaluate the research productivity of authors. Excluding these two journals from the body of journals

undergoing ranking, but including them as sources of citations advances Econometrica and Review of Economic

Studies to 4th and 5th place, respectively, in the per-article rankings, similar to their positions in the per-journal

rankings.

economics‐impact rankings, fall in the per‐article rankings. In addition to the journals already

mentioned in the within‐economics context, International Review of Law and Economics, Journal of

Labor Economics, National Tax Journal, Journal of Industrial Economics, Review of Economic Studies,

and Review of Financial Studies advance substantially and are among the highest‐ranked 25

journals on a per‐article basis. For most of the other journals, per‐article rankings by overall

impact are fairly similar to their per‐article rankings by economics impact, and the correlation

for the entire sample of journals is 0.80. In addition, as in the total‐articles rankings, per‐article

rankings under the overall‐impact method are strongly correlated with the per‐article rankings

by adjusted impact on noneconomics journals (correlation 0.91).

Journal standings by policy impact on a per‐article basis follow many of the patterns

already discussed for economic impact and overall impact. The top spot is won by Brookings

Papers on Economic Activity, followed by Quarterly Journal of Economics and NBER Macroeconomics

Annual. The high influence of articles in Brookings Papers and the Macroeconomics Annual may be

indicative of the potentially greater policy relevance when editors assign topics, as opposed to

leaving these choices to the researchers themselves. Alternatively, they may reflect the status

that policy‐oriented scholars confer upon economics journals whose authors are selected by the

journal editors.

5.3 Insights from Adopting a Content‐based Definition of Economics

The journals we considered from the non‐economics categories in JCR, which have been

ignored in other studies ranking economics journals, vary greatly in their rankings. Several

journals—Industrial and Labor Relations Review, International Money and Finance Review, and

Journal of Financial Studies—appear in the top 50 in the economics‐impact rankings, measured by

impact‐adjusted citations both in total and per article. Most others are in the middle‐to‐lower

range in economics impact.

Economics‐oriented journals outside the JCR economics category generally achieve

much higher ranks in the overall‐impact and policy‐impact rankings. Some even rise to the top

range. Thus, the inclusion of these journals is important in order to capture the channels

through which the economics discipline influences social sciences at large and policy‐related

publications in particular.

5.4 The Effects of Journal Characteristics on Rankings: Regression Analysis

The summary presented above is based largely on examples of relatively well‐known

journals. In order to determine the factors systematically associated with a journal’s position in

various ranking exercises and to summarize better the patterns of rankings in general, we

estimated simple multivariate linear regressions using some of the variables in our journalscoring

database (Table 3). The regressions are not intended to provide a full explanation of the

factors affecting the rankings, since many factors at play, such as the editors’ and authors’

characteristics, are not captured by our database. The dependent variables are the journal

rankings in the six specifications, from 1 to 178. Therefore, independent variables serving to

move journals higher in the rankings are associated with a negative coefficient.

Whether examined in a narrow or a broad or a targeted context, journals publishing

more articles tend to have greater influence than journals containing fewer articles. By contrast,

a journal’s size has no systematic effect on the average influence per article. Therefore, authors

should not expect to have their articles cited any more frequently, or in more prestigious

publications, if they appear in journals that publish large numbers of other articles.

As commonly believed, publishing theoretical or mathematical research tends to raise a

journal’s standing within the economics discipline. Such an orientation also improves an

economics journal’s rankings in the social sciences at large, although not as much as in

economics. On a per‐article basis, theory‐oriented journals tend to have more influence among

policy journals, but again not as much as within just economics.

We did not include sophistication in the regressions because this variable is highly collinear with theoretical

orientation and policy orientation.

An empirical/applied orientation plays an important role in boosting a journal’s

rankings based on policy impact, but does not turn out to be a robust factor affecting a journal’s

rankings within economics or in the social sciences at large. These findings bear important

implications for scholars and journal editors who want to build broader influence outside of

economics. They also help to explain why some comprehensive journals with both theoretical

and empirical focuses, such as American Economic Review and Quarterly Journal of Economics,

perform well in all rankings.

As discussed, the iterative method assigns differential weights to journal citations,

depending on how frequently the citing journals are cited by other journals. To help evaluate

how our journal rankings are affected by the number of citations versus the prestige of citing

journals, we estimated similar regressions using the unweighted rankings produced in the first

iteration and compared them with those produced through iteration. Within economics, articles in

empirical journals received almost as many citations as articles in

theoretical journals, as shown in the first‐iteration rankings (Appendix Table 2). Therefore, it is

the smaller average influence of the journals citing articles in empirical journals that reduces

their influence on the profession, as compared with theoretical journals. By contrast, there

appears to be no systematic difference in the prestige of the policy journals citing empirical

versus theoretical economics journals, so the coefficients from using the first‐iteration rankings

are very similar to those from using the citation‐adjusted rankings.

The final three variables test whether an economics journal’s field, broadly defined, has

an effect on its impact‐adjusted citations. One of these variables indicates whether or not the

journal has a strong policy orientation. Another denotes whether or not the journal is listed in

the JCR economics category, providing an indicator of whether or not it is encompassed by the

traditional view of economics, and was therefore included in previous ranking studies. Not

surprisingly, journals receive greater attention within their own circles. Policy impacts are

higher for policy‐oriented journals, and economics impacts are higher for JCR‐designated

economics journals. On the other hand, the regressions do not provide compelling evidence that

being in either of these categories yields greater influence on standing among all social science

journals, after controlling for the mix of theoretical versus empirical content. The last variable is

an indicator of whether or not a journal is interdisciplinary, measured by whether or not JCR

lists the journal in more than one field. Journals in econometrics and mathematical methods,

international economics, and some planning‐ and business‐oriented fields are frequently crosslisted.

Being interdisciplinary has an insignificant effect, except in the case of overall social

sciences citations.

6. Conclusion

Evaluations of the research productivity of economists tend to restrict their focus to the

publications in the Journal Citation Reports economics category. This study extends the impactadjusted

citations‐based ranking method so as to make it applicable to the use of alternative

evaluative criteria. It expands the scope for impact‐adjusted computations from journals in a

particular discipline to the whole body of social science journals. It further extends the method

to determining a journal’s influence according to a targeted set of journals. This technique is

applied to ranking economics journals according to their influence on policy journals, but it can

be applied more generally to any case in which the body of evaluating literature differs from the

body of literature being evaluated.

In all, the study compares the results of six different ranking methodologies: influence

within economics, within social sciences, and within policy, each of which is measured

according to total impact‐adjusted citations as well as by average impact‐adjusted citations per

article. We argue that adjusting total citations by the number of articles published in each cited

journal is a control for size superior to other controls that focus on the number of pages or

characters. Furthermore, it is our preferred method when using citations to gauge the expected

influence of a scholarly paper.

Using a ranking based on total citations within economics, American Economic Review

ranks highest, followed by Quarterly Journal of Economics, Econometrica, Journal of Political

Economy, and Review of Economic Studies. Applying the same body of citations but adjusting for

the number of articles published in the cited journals results in NBER Macroeconomics Annual

attaining the top ranking and Brookings Papers on Economic Activity and Journal of Economic

Growth also rising to the top five. The four rankings using broader bodies of citing literature

yield some different frontrunners—Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Health Economics,

and Journal of Law and Economics—along with American Economic Review (for policy impact, not

adjusted for the number of articles). In addition, the relative standings of many other journals

are different from what they are in the base case that measures total impact‐adjusted citations

within economics. The changes in rankings are due in part to idiosyncratic factors about each

journal’s readership, notably the relatively broad interest outside economics in certain topics in

applied microeconomics as well as economic development. The changes are due also to

differences in the relative importance that different literatures assign to theoretical and

empirical contributions. Finally, they reflect the finding that journal size has no systematic effect

on influence per article, regardless of which body of citing literature is used.

The second major contribution of the study lies in investigating the interdisciplinary

communication patterns among social sciences based on including the universe of the social

science journals in JCR. This analysis identifies the list of disciplines that contribute to the

development of economics as well as the disciplines that draw significant contributions from

economics. On the one hand, we confirm other researchers’ conclusions that the economics

literature is more self‐contained than almost any other social science discipline. On the other

hand, we find that economists draw considerably from mathematical methods used in other

social sciences, not just those used in economics. Our results also serve to highlight mutual links

between some economics journals and journals in the environmental studies and planning and

development literatures that have been largely ignored in previous discussions of JCR

categories.

This paper has focused on characteristics of articles and journals, and on the intensity of

citations across journals. Much more extensive research would be needed to identify which

types of contributions from the economics literature are used most in other fields—

contributions to methodology, theory, or empirical questions or results. This would require

categorizing and identifying the nature of specific citations, not just tallying them.

In recent years, the Internet has opened a new and increasingly prominent

communication channel in the intellectual community. Studies appear to be cited more and

more in electronically‐available working paper form before being published. Furthermore,

several journals have “gone electronic” without abandoning the refereeing process that

characterizes many of the existing academic publications. It is natural to ask how these and

other changes in the structure of publications and citations affect the relevance of ranking

studies. The application of the impact‐adjusted citations methodology to these alternative

outlets would require that they be included in the data as both citing and cited publications. The

criteria for inclusion in the JCR database do not impose any obvious barriers for electronic

journals.Those who are interested in continuing to use ranking studies should hope that the

entry of electronic journals with relatively short refereeing and publication lags will serve to

produce quicker dissemination of economic research in general. This would reduce the

proportion of studies that are cited as working papers, which generally lack the quality controls

Further broadening the database to encompass working papers poses the problem of duplication of citations: Any

journal article referred to in a working paper would automatically be cited again in the published version.

imposed by journals. In the meantime, based on our findings regarding total versus per‐article

citations, we urge those who may undertake studies of the influence of working paper series to

consider their impacts per working paper, not just in total.

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