My ranking of environmental and resource economics journals

John Berstrom on the RESECON listserv:

I have been assigned the interesting task of ranking professional journals in the natural resource and environmental economics field in order to provide guidance for our university's promotion and tenure process. Of course I am familiar with existing quantitative tools for ranking professional journals such as Impact Factors. However, being on old survey researcher, I want to take an informal, un-scientific poll of RESECON participants.

In the spirit of importance-significance analysis, professional journals could be ranked based on both the significance of the journal and the importance of the articles published. For the purposes of this survey, let the "significance" of a journal be defined as the professional prestige of the journal. Let the "importance" of a journal be defined as the practical value to society of articles published. Thus, based on these definitions, a journal could have a high significance level (e.g., professionals consider the journal highly prestigious) but have a low importance level (e.g., professionals consider the articles published to have low practical value), and vice-versa.

Here is the survey question:

Based on the significance and importance of the journal as defined above and where you can weight these two factors however you deem best, please provide your ranking from 1 to 5 (where 1 is the best) of what you consider to be the five (5) top-tier professional journals in the natural resource and environmental economics field ...

Here is my list:

1. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management
2. Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists
3. Environmental and Resource Economics
4. Land Economics
5. Resource and Energy Economics

Notes:

• I left out the agricultural economics journals. While you might rather have your paper published in those relative to my 1-5, there is too much agriculture to call them environmental and resource economics journals.
• I did a bit of forecasting with JAERE. In my own decision making I already consider JAERE to be the top journal (this means that I don't send my papers there :). 
• I would rank Marine Resource Economics 6th and Ecological Economics 7th. I rarely read a paper in Environment and Development Economics.
• I'm not sure what to do with REEP. It could be ranked 1st based on the usual journal ranking metrics. But you don't send your regular papers there so I left it off the list and placed it in its own category.