New Rankings of Economics Journals: Documenting and Explaining the Rise of the New Society Journals

Abstract

We update citation-based rankings of economics journals to study the relative ranking of new society journals. We employ two ranking methods: a standard iterative eigenfactor methodology adjusted for reference intensity and a novel top-5 citation alternative. We find that the American Economic Association journals (AEJ-Applied, AEJ-Macro, AEJ-Micro and AEJ-Policy) and the Econometric Society journals (Quantitative Economics and Theoretical Economics), are the top-ranked within their respective fields, and the Journal of the European Economic Association is similarly highly ranked. We explore different mechanisms to investigate the rapid rise and consistently strong performance of these new society journals in economics.

Keywords: citations, rankings, impact factors