More environmental economics journal rankings

Here are the rankings from Rousseau, Verbeke and Rousseeau (2009) based citations as of 10/2/07 to articles published during 2001-2004 (with 2005 ISI impact factors in parentheses):

1. Ecological Economics (1.179)
2. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (1.529)
3. Land Economics (0.974)
4. Resource and Energy Economics (1.541)
5. Energy Journal (0.707)
6. Environmental and Resource Economics (0.49)
7. American Journal of Agricultural Economics (0.967)
8. Energy Economics (0.564)
9. Australian Journal of Agricultural Economics (0.867)
10. Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics (0.347)
11. Environment and Development Economics (0.323)
12. Natural Resource Journal (0.556)

Comments:

• Any ranking that does not find JEEM #1 is suspect.
• The conclusions discuss self-citations (which would penalize Ecological Economics) but the results are not presented. The knock here is that ecological economics doesn't have much influence beyond ecological economics.
• ERE is difficult to rank with TOP-curve. It has a few highly cited papers including the highest cited paper (Carson, Flores and Meade 2001) but the rest of the papers (e.g. this one) are mediocre.
• AJAE gets creamed [all the Aggies go "I hate 'TOP-Curve' analysis]. It is usually ranked higher.
• REE ranks higher than usual and it is the lowest in self-citations.
• Where is Marine Resource Economics? Not included in ISI during the time period?

Reference

Sandra Rousseau, Tom Verbeke, and Ronald Rousseau, "Evaluating Environmental and Resource Economics Journals: A TOP-Curve Approach," Review of Environmental Economics and Policy Advance, May 1, 2009, DOI 10.1093/reep/rep002.

Abstract: This article applies an alternative approach to the measurement of scholarly quality, namely the use of TOP-curves, in order to rank journals in the field of environmental and resource economics. This measure summarizes the incidence, intensity, and inequality of these journals’ highly cited articles. Moreover, TOP-curves allow analysts to rank journals according to TOP-dominance. The journal ranking based on the TOP-dominance criterion does not match the ranking based on the journals’ impact factors. Indeed, TOP-curves provide more detailed information on the relative ranking of journals since they take into account the composition and the distribution of citations within the top group.