Another journal rankings paper -- how do the Env. Econ. journals do?

An economics journals' ranking that takes into account the number of pages and co-authors, Pedro Cosme Costa Vieira a (a Faculdade de Economia do Porto, Portugal), Applied Economics, Volume 40, Issue 7 April 2008, pages 1 - 9; 26 July 2007

Abstract
In this article, I examine whether the academics reward policy must correlate positively with the published number of articles per co-author, number of pages and journals reputation. This is accomplished by estimating a nonlinear model with a panel data from 168 economics journals covered in the ISI-Web of Knowledge database (58 825 articles). The data reinforces the conjecture that published article value is slightly increasing with the number of co-authors and is proportional to the number of pages. The data also suggests that there are four distinct groups related to journal quality that I name A, B+, B and B-.

Hmmmm. This paper suffers from grade inflation! Dare I re-grade and change grades to A, B, C and D?

First thing: This paper, at least the pre-publication working paper, does the annoying and doesn't filter out the non-economics journals. So, the top 10 journals are:

1. Journal of Marketing
2. Journal of Consumer Research
3. American Economic Review
4. Journal of Marketing Research
5. Econometrica
6. Harvard Business Review
7. Journal of Economic Literature
8. Journal of Political Economy
9. Journal of Economic Perspectives
10. Quarterly Journal of Economics

I'd delete 1, 2, 4 and 6 as non-economics journals and the usual suspects are at the top of the list. Ignoring JEL and the JEP, the top 4 journals are AER, Econometrica, JPE and QJE. Right on.

In the A list is another unusual find. Health Economics (#12) is ranked ahead of Journal of Health Economics (#20). Is that the way health economists prefer these two journals to be ranked? Another oddity: Economic Inquiry is at #73 and grades out as a C journal. Ouch! says the western economic association types. The southern economic association types shrug their shoulders when they find the Southern Economic Journal at 103 (also a C grade).

Here are the rankings for the journals that tend to publish most environmental and natural resource economics articles:

22. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (B)
26. Ecological Economics (B)
30. American Journal of Agricultural Economics (B)
78. Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics (C)
91. Energy Journal (C)
94. Resource and Energy Economics (C)
100. Energy Economics (C)

Land Economics and Environmental and Resource Economics don't appear. The first is a surprise while the latter isn't (EARE is never included in these lists because its data isn't released, or something like that).

Here are my own self-important comments on the rankings of these journals.

Comments

[Will]

Does anyone know why ERE isn't listed in the rankings? Does ISI not index it because it's not a US journal?

[gormk]

Will,

I think John is suggesting above that Environmental and Resource Economics (ERE) doesn’t release data permitting it to be evaluated under the criteria by this ranking paper. In other rankings, it is listed, although not very highly: http://www.env-econ.net/2008/01/top-journals-in.html.

In my opinion, ERE is the “best” journal for environmental economics (maybe not resource economics). The reason it that it publishes frequently (monthly), and permits analyses of varying degrees of sophistication, provided the context is policy-important. This makes it more reflective of what is going on in our field, than for example, JEEM. Also, if you are trying to generate new research ideas, browsing ERE could be inspiring, whereas browsing JEEM is dizzying (and possibly depressing).

To publish in JEEM, it seems to me that author(s) go to extreme ("embezzling") lengths to argue that the paper is doing something methodologically novel (conceptually or empirically). It begs the question: “If you are honestly making a contribution to economic theory or econometric methods, why do you submit the paper to JEEM?” Historically, however, there is no doubt that many seminal papers in the field have been published in JEEM. I just don’t think the journal is that relevant anymore (aside from bringing prestige to author(s) due to its unmovable status in the rankings*).

AJAE, although typically ranked higher than many other environmental and resource economics journals, in my mind, doesn’t come close to ERE in quality, due to its continued joint focus on purely agricultural economics research (commodity demand and production analysis). Unfortunately, many environmental and resource economists continue to “endorse” this journal because it brings them publication prestige*.

I also find it bizarre that LAND is excluded from the ranking. Land Economics is a very good journal that sometimes permits a bit more provocative topics and approaches than AJAE and JEEM.

Gormk

*Does anyone have ideas for how to break these two journals’ prestige monopoly? One way could be to create an auction market, wherein junior (not yet established) researchers compensate the fields’ prominent folks (Smith, Hanemann, Haab, Whitehead, and others) for re-directing their “best” (most complicated) papers to journals with more frequent publications and quicker turn-around. I just don’t know how to make the market incentive compatible…

Gorm, As someone who has thought a lot about journal publishing, let me give you a few opinions:

First, getting big names to move is a silly idea -- in theory. OTOH, they may attract more readers, which leads to more citations.

Second, there are two roads to success -- *good* paper or ranked journal. Many tenure decisions are made on the weighted average of number of citations and Impact factor (i.e., 1 citation on an AER paper = 25 citations on an ERE paper). More primitive tenure decisions use the impact only, which means that one AER is "worth" 25 EREs. Sad.

Third, the way to increase impact is to get cited. By your own measure, ERE's impact will rise and JEEM's will fall if ERE papers are getting more citations. Unfortunately, useful ideas (e.g., google algorithm) may get no citations, even when they save humanity, so you need to write papers that academics cite for their "academic" thoughts. JEEM > ERE.

Bottom Line: Back our AMJA idea linked above. It's the fastest route to a revolution in academics.

[David Zetland]

That comment was by me. Typepad error.