Journal rankings can be controversial. At the same time, the quality of a journal in which one’s research is published is generally thought to be very important for a researcher’s career, and many researchers are thus rightly concerned about it.
Here at Academic Sequitur, we came up with a new way (to the best of our knowledge) to think about how a journal is perceived by the profession. This blog post focuses on the field of economics. We start with the premise that the top 5 economic journals (AER, Econometrica, JPE, QJE, and ReStud) are really the best in the profession, on average. Then we calculate what percent of authors who published in another journal have at least one “top 5” publication. The higher than number is, the more likely it is to be a high-quality journal. In non-top-5 journals, we considered all articles published since 2018 (results are similar if we start in 2009, when the AEJs were started). For calculating whether an author has a top-5 publication, we used top 5 articles since the year 2000.
Before I show you the results, it’s important to note that one thing which can affect this ranking is the topic of the journal under consideration. If a journal’s focus is not “sexy” enough for a top 5 journal, that’s likely going to lower its ranking. Whether this is a feature or a bug I will let you decide.
So with that, here are journals that come out on top, based on the overall proportion of authors publishing at least one article in any top 5 (the rest of the columns show the journal-specific proportions).
Four interesting things about these rankings: First, the shares are really high for eight out of ten of these journals, with about half the authors having at least one top 5. To me, this pattern suggests that we definitely shouldn’t overlook the non-top-5-journals when looking for quality articles. Second, these eight journals are pretty close to each other according to this metric, suggesting that quality differences between them are not large. Third, this metric largely aligns with what I think are the general perceptions of applied microeconomists in North America, with one exception: we seem to be giving the Journal of the European Economic Association less credit than it deserves. Fourth, the rankings would definitely change if we used specific journals for comparison rather than the overall top-5 metric.
Here’s the next set of journals. Keep in mind that we didn’t perform these calculations for all journals in our database (this is just a blog post, after all). So if you don’t see your favorite journal, that doesn’t mean it’s ranked lower than these. It just means we didn’t calculate a ranking for it. But if you’d like, leave us a comment and we’ll tell you how your favorite journal ranks!
While this metric is unlikely to be perfect, it is also unlikely to be worse than citation impact measures. And its benefit for economics specifically is that it isn’t as affected by publication lags as a citation-based measure. What do you think?