Core Journals in Economics

GAINES H. LINER (*) This article ranks core journals in economics using the textbook citation method. Rankings are produced from citations in graduate-level microeconomics, macroeconomics, and econometrics textbooks. Textbooks used in the study were chosen through responses from a survey of professors in top-tier economics departments. The top nine journals or core journals from this study correlate closely in rank with the results of two comparison studies. Second-tier journals identified in this study correlate less closely in rank with second-tier journals in comparison studies. (JEL A) I. INTRODUCTION Between 1970 and 1990 the number of published pages in economics journals more than doubled (Laband and Piette 1994), and during the early 1970s budgets of libraries devoted to journals grew, in percentage terms, several-fold relative to those devoted to books (Liebowitz and Palmer 1984). Laband and Piette (1994) reported that between 1976 and 1985 at least 55 new economics journals commenced publication. Although not all journals are considered general interest journals many emphasize the importance of economic theory in their submission instructions to authors. With this increased emphasis on research, scholars and administrators alike have acquired an increased sensitivity to how journals rank in quality, influence, or impact. The variety of methods used to rank journals, departments, and authors attests to the increased concern individuals place on such issues. The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI; Institute for Scientific Information 1986) has figured prominently as a source of data in a variety of studies. Burton and Phimister (1995), Laband and Piette (1994), Liebowitz and Palmer (1984), and Stigler et al. (1995 provide recent examples. Another approach occasionally used in ranking of economics departments involves choosing citation data from the "premier," "core," or "principal" journals. Departmental rankings are then based on the number of journal articles or pages published by members of their faculty in these journals. Graves et al. (1982), Burkitt and Baimbridge (1995), Conroy et al. (1995), Scott and Mitias (1996), and Dusansky and Vernon (1998) have used variations of this approach. Others have surveyed deans and chairpersons for their own rankings of journals. See Enomoto and Ghosh (1993) for one recent example. A potential weakness of this approach is that survey respondents can be influenced by recent and not-so-recent literature on the subject and by each other. Some earlier studies have attempted to rank journals by their quality. See Liebowitz and Palmer (1984) for a review and Beed and Beed (1996) for a criticism of attempts to measure journal quality. Because an objective ranking of journals by their quality is difficult if not impossible, most recent studies mentioned above have attempted to rank journals based on their "impact" or their "influence." Ranking the number of citations to journal articles in other journal articles provides only one path to measuring the potential impact a journal has on individuals and the profession and ultimately the broader community. Davis (1998) pointed out that the often-used SSCI data under represent journals that share content with other social sciences. A second problem noted is that "not all of any journal's citations are identified by citing journal. In every case the list is truncated, and some portion of a journal's citations are simply entered as 'all other'" (Davis, 1998, 62). Moreover, the percentage of citations in the "all other" category is not necessarily the same from journal to journal. This might bias raw counts of citations as well as attempts to adjust for "impact" by adjusting for the number of pages or the number of characters in the cited journals. However, these biases tend to have less impact on rankings of core journals than less highly ranked journals. In attempts to rank authors of journal articles using SSCI data, Alexander and Mabry (1994) noted that the SSCI does not include in the counts the second and subsequent authors of multiple-author articles. …