To obtain the files of article records we used the Econlit database provided by EBSCOHost to conduct a field search for each individual journal title, limited to the years 1985 through 2004.<sup>6</sup> If a journal started publication after 1985 we started with the earliest possible date. Every Econlit record is assigned metadata separated into fields. We kept data from the following fields: Author; Author Affiliation; Journal Name; Journal Issue; Descriptor Classification Codes (JEL codes); and Geographical Descriptors. We manually cleaned up the Author-Affiliation field and identified the 100 first academic institutions in addition to three multilateral organizations (IMF, UN and World Bank).<sup>7,8</sup> Geographic Descriptors refer to either a specific country, or a generic group of countries.<sup>9</sup> An article was thus assigned to a specific country if the Geographic Descriptor made an explicit mention of the country and it was labeled as a “cross-country study” otherwise. Papers with no associated geographic descriptors were identified and classified in the category of “theoretical contributions”. The data were then aggregated up to create a country*year dataset of total publication counts broken down by three types of journals (Top-5, Top-10 journals, all journals) and author affiliations.<sup>10</sup> journals as well as citations in other social science and policy journals. In addition, we use the eigen-factor ranking produced as part of a research project at University of Washington. The eigen factor is associated with a specified set of journals and is a measure of the overall value provided by all the articles published in a given journal in a year. The Article Influence is a measure of a journal’s influence based on the number of citations per article. Thus, according to the Article Influence ranking, one publication in the _American Economic Review_ will count for 4.9 publications, while one publication in the _Journal of Development Economics_ will count for 1.4 publications.

6 Due to the unavailability of data on some governance indicators and growth variables for the years 2005 and onwards, we restrict all the analysis in this paper for the years 1985-2004.

7 We take the 100 first institutions ranked by the number of pages published provided by Kalaitzidakis et al. (2003). These institutions produced a third of the total number of publications over the period 1985-2004. Affiliations we did not uniquely identify were coded “Other”.

8 The codes used to identify the institutional affiliations are open access (http://econ.worldbank.org/staff/qdo/), and we welcome additions to the list of institutions already identified. Above all, we encourage Econlit to code authors, their affiliations, geographic descriptors and other paper attributes in a more standardized fashion.

9 Articles with broadly defined geographical identifiers such as “Selected Countries” or “Europe” were difficult to link to a specific geographical entity. An Econlit representative pointed out that such identifiers usually represent research arising from cross-country empirical techniques. For instance, a continent identifier such as “Europe” would be used for research on a general topic (such as climate change) across a large number of countries in the continent. It is unclear how to deal with cross-country empirical work, and such papers are excluded from this analysis entirely.

10 One limitation of our approach is that important research outlets may still be omitted from this database. Many papers on India, for instance, are published in the _Economic and Political Weekly_ , which does not appear here; neither is research that only appears in reports or books incorporated in this analysis. This database also ignores policy reports and other country specific analyses that are not submitted through the formal academic refereeing system, but with potentially important policy impact such as World Bank’s Country Economic Memorandums, IMF Country Reports, or the United Nations Development Program’s National Human Development Reports.

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