Pierre-Philippe Combes
email: ppcombes@univmed.fr.

Laurent Linnemer
email: laurent.linnemer@ensae.fr.

Georges Bresson

Philippe Février

Rob Xavier D'haultf÷uille

Alain Porter

Michael Trannoy

Visser

Inferring Missing

Keywords: Economics of science, Journals assessment, Research citations Jel Codes: I23, C53

This paper presents a novel ranking of economics journals. Our methodology is the following. First, we construct an index to rank the 304 journals recorded in the Thomson Reuters (JCR) database, for which citation counts exist. This index combines (sophisticated) citation indexes, eld of specialization normalized indexes, and a h-index based on Google Scholar citations. Moreover this index puts forward journals in economics. Second, we extend this index to the 898 EconLit non JCR journals. We estimate a model in which the index is explained by the score of the journal's authors and its Google Scholar citations. Finally we use the estimated model to predict the value of the index for the non JCR journals. Therefore we obtain a consistent ranking index of all EconLit journals.

Introduction

The need for a complete journal ranking in economics is growing. More and more countries or universities make nancing, promotion, or grants dependent on a good evaluation of the research output of their academics. In economics the main research output takes the form of an article in a refereed journal.

Economists ling patent requests stand, for example, as an exception. Books or chapter in books, as well as conferences or seminars, are often considered as complementary to refereed articles. In parallel, the number of academic journals is growing: in 2000 EconLit had 704 active journals, whereas it includes today 1048 active journals, 360 new ones in 10 years. As a result, it is certainly more and more dicult to assess the quality of research through the journal where it is published.

A complete journal ranking is useful for all these reasons. At the individual level, it allows computing publication indexes that do not provide as precise information as one could gather by a detailed reading of the articles, or at least by the citation they receive, but that provide a reliable summary of a researcher's

The characteristics of our ranking can be summarized as follows:

1. The eld of interest is economics.

(a) All EconLit journals are ranked but only them. (b) The Journals that have a high share of economists among authors are given a bonus.

(c) Survey or commissioning journals or issues are downgraded.

2. Objective information on citations is used to rank journals. Our index averages:

(a) JCR citation indexes rankings, (b) Another inuence index, namely a Google Scholar h-index, (c) JCR citation indexes that are controlled for the journal's eld of specialization within economics as recorded by JEL codes.

3. For journals who miss previous indexes, an estimated model of their inuence is used. It uses as explanatory variables:

(a) The performance of the journals' authors, (b) A number of Google Scholar indexes.

4. Some monotonous transformation are then applied to our cardinal ranking. We propose two continuous variants and a discrete one: (a) A selective one with highly convex weights, CLh. (b) Another one with a medium degree of convexity, CLm.

(c) A discrete, six class, ranking, CLd.

A quick tour of the EconLit database

The EconLit database is the electronic bibliography of the American Economic Association. 2 Members of the American Economic Association have a free online access to the database. We rank all EconLit Journals and only them.

Number of journals and entry rate

The number of journals included in the database is quite large and it has been continously increasing since 1969. According to the web site, 1202 journals have been referenced once in the EconLit database (including, but not counting twice, journals which changed their name since 1969). The total number of active journals is, however, smaller as the coverage of some journals has stopped. Currently, the EconLit database references 1048 journals. That is, 154 journals that appeared once in the EconLit database are no longer covered.

3 We are able to rank 1168 journals, the remaining 34 ones being excluded from EconLit for too long a time or, on the contrary, being too young and having too few articles. Consequently a large fraction of journals are relatively young. The EconLit database is 40 year old but half of the journals are less than 12 year old 4 and 25% (or 263 journals) of the 1048 journals are in the EconLit database for less than 6 years.

JEL codes

Articles in EconLit appear with (in general) several JEL codes. These codes come in the following format: $ # # 0. That is, rst a capital letter, then 2 digits and a zero at the end. Two codes starting with the same capital letter belong to the same broadly dened eld and there are 20 of them. If two codes have the same capital letter and the same rst digit they both belong to the same subeld (among 131 possible subelds), and there are 778 subsubelds.

What are the JEL codes used by the authors of the articles referenced in EconLit? To answer this question, we count the total number of spells in EconLit of each code over the last ten years, each article counting for one only as a whole. That is, if an article has two JEL codes, 0.5 spell is attributed to each. Summing over all articles and dividing by the total number of articles gives the share of each code.

Citation rankings

As shown in the previous section, the number of journals to rank is quite large and no individual is able to evaluate all these journals by her/himself. To resort to citation based rankings is not only a natural idea when looking for information, it is mandatory.

JCR citation rankings

The main source of citation information is the ISI database maintained by Thomson-Reuters (also called Journal of Citation Reports or JCR for simplicity here). 5 The basic citation index is the so called Impact Factor (IF). Year y, IF of a journal is simply the average number of citations received in year y by all papers published in that journal during the two preceding years.

6 Intuitively, this relatively short time frame is not optimal for economics journals due to the relatively long time it takes to publish a paper (probably more than 3 years on average).

Besides this time frame problem, the IF has been criticized on the ground that a citation from a prestigious journal should be more valued than a citation from a less prestigious one. Hence rened (recursive) citation indexes have been proposed and computed. They use a method similar to the one followed by Google to rank webpages. This started with Laband et Piette (1994) followed by Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, et Stengos (2003). [START_REF] Palacio-Huerta | The measurement of intellectual inuence[END_REF] improved on Laband et Piette but consider 34 journals only. [START_REF] Kodrzycki | New approaches to ranking economics journals[END_REF] as well as [START_REF] Ritzberger | A ranking of journals in economics and related elds[END_REF] propose various alternative approaches and extend the journal list that counts around 200 entries (See [START_REF] Ritzberger | A ranking of journals in economics and related elds[END_REF] for a complete overview).

We rely here on two recent internet-based projects that make available citation rankings on a larger scale. The rst (and oldest) one is the Red Jasper site. 7 The second one is the Eigenfactor TM journals. This underlines that each type captures a dierent notion of impact, the global inuence of the journal and the average inuence of one of its article that would be picked up randomly. Considering the two important to capture the visibility of a journal, we will average the two notions.

Table 1 summarizes the main characteristics of the most recent journal rankings. Imagine that a researcher goes to the library and selects a journal article at random from a journal published in 2006. After reading the article, the researcher selects at random one of the citations from the article. She 6 Editorials and letters to the editor are excluded in the sense that they are not counted for the total number of published articles. However, citations from editorials or letters to the editor as well as self citations are taken into account which creates some controversy among specialists.

7 See http://www.journal-ranking.com/ranking/web/index.html. More documentation on both Red Jasper and Eigenfactor TM projects can be found on the web. 10 The main dierence is that for the Eigenfactor TM indicators the auto-citation are excluded (if an article cites another article of the same journal it is not taken into account) while they are not necessarily in the Red Jasper indexes (online users have three choices for the weight of self citations, 0, 0.5, and 1). The time frame chosen by the Eigenfactor TM project is the following: for a given census year, they count the citations received by the papers published during the ve preceding years (publication window). On the Red Jasper website various publication windows can be chosen (since start, 1996-2005, or 2001-2005) Table 2 show the Spearman correlations between several indexes of Table 1. These rank correlations are relatively high but they also show that rankings dier. To assess variations at the journal level, Table 3 lists the top 25 journals for the four main rankings: PII, JII, AI and EF. Both similarities and disparities between rankings emerge. Econometrica is rst in both PII and JII but 5th and 4th for AI and EF. The variance of the American Economic Review's rank is even more pronounced: 1st according to EF but only 12th for AI. Typically journals with more articles have a better rank in volume rankings (JII and EF) than in per-article rankings (PII and AI). There seems to be more old journals (measured here in terms of EconLit age) at the top of these rankings but some young journals also enjoy a good 10 See in particular [START_REF] Bergstrom | The Eigenfactor TM metrics[END_REF] and references herein as well as [START_REF] Lim | Journal-Ranking.com: An online interactive journal ranking system[END_REF].

rank as for instance Economic Letters, International Organization, J. of Economic Growth, Rand J. of Economics, Review of Accounting Studies, or Review of Financial Studies.

Two issues will deserve more attention below. First, and not surprisingly three survey/commissioning journals, J. of Economic Literature, Brookings Papers on Eco. Activity, and J. of Economic Perspectives are very well ranked in per-article rankings. This reects the undeniable combined facts that their articles are highly cited and that they do not publish many articles. Second, nesides survey/commissioning journals, the top-25 is populated with rather eld journals that are of interest to economists but which would not be considered as core economics journals. Example are American Political Science Review, International Organization, J. of Accounting and Economics, J. of Accounting Research, J. of the American Statistical Asso., and Review of Accounting Studies. Note that three out of these six journals are accounting journals.

Aggregation of JCR citation rankings

Even if the correlation among the four main JCR rankings is relatively high (see Table 2), at the individual level the rank of a journal can vary substantially from one ranking to an other (see Table 3).

The reasons behind these variations are usually understandable. If a journal tends to publish more articles than the average, its rank tends to be higher in the volume rankings. This also works the other way round: J. of Economic Growth takes advantage of its relatively low number of articles (64 articles between 2004 and 2008 compared to 993 for the American Economic Review or 1,416 for Economic Letters) to reach a high rank in per-article rankings.

One can argue at length in favor of a per-article or a volume point of view. Our opinion is that both perspectives are informative and have to be taken into account. Similarly, for the publication window, both the long term (Red Jasper) and the short term (Eigenfactor TM ) perspectives have their pros and cons. For these reasons, we propose an aggregate index, JCR, which corresponds to the average rank of a journal over all four rankings: This problem has been pointed out several times by the literature. Both for this reason, and also in order to limit the number of journals to consider, Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, et Stengos (2003) restrict their analysis to the JCR economics category journals only (the bold journals in the Tables). Such a binary choice is not satisfactory because many journals which are not in the economics category of the JCR share methodologies and authors with the economics category journals and are natural outlets for economists. [START_REF] Kodrzycki | New approaches to ranking economics journals[END_REF] try to get around this diculty by creating their own economics category. They rank 181 economics journals in total, of which 146 are drawn from the 159 journals in the JCR economics category, and 35 are drawn from the other JCR categories. They identify a journal's disciplinary origin by inspecting the content of its articles (mainly title and abstract). 12 Somehow in the same spirit, [START_REF] Ritzberger | A ranking of journals in economics and related elds[END_REF] constructs a personal list of JCR journals to conduct his ranking analysis.

JCR = (PII + AI + JII + EF ) /4 = X∈{PII,AI,JII,EF } rank(X )/4
The common goal of these authors is to put the emphasis on economics journals without restricting themselves to the JCR denition, which, on the one hand, is relatively narrow and, on the other hand, excludes journals that intuitively should be considered. We propose a new strategy to achieve the same purpose. The rst advantage of our strategy is that it is not as subjective as previous attempts. The second benet is that we do not impose a binary criterium. On the contrary we construct a continuous variable that measures the degree (between 0 and 1) of economics content of any EconLit journals.

Our method uses information both contained within the EconLit database and related to the economics category of the JCR. The rst step consists in computing for each EconLit author the percentage of his/her publications in these JCR economics journals. The second step averages for each journal this percentage over all its authors. Let econ denote this percentage. For each EconLit journal, econ is the percentage of articles belonging to the JCR economics category written by the average author of this journal.

The distribution of the variable econ across journals is presented in Table 4. On average a journal of the JCR economics category is econ 0.68 while for journals outside this category but still in JCR the average is 0.16. JCR journals outside the economics category are not very dierent than the non JCR EconLit journals. If anything they have a lower econ.

By construction journals of the JCR economics category have a larger econ. Though, econ varies signicantly inside and outside the JCR economics category. It provides a relatively precise idea of the economics orientation of the authors of the journals. For example, journals like Nature or Science are not in EconLit, but if they were (as we conjecture that few economists publish in them) they would have a rather low econ.

We correct the rough JCR index by econ in the following way: JCR_econ = X∈{PII,AI,JII,EF } rank (econ × X) /4 As for JCR indexes, we compute the average rank not the average score (see Section 10.3 and 10.4 for alternatives). As the JCR index exists only for the 304 journals which are both in EconLit and in the JCR, the JCR_econ index exists also for these journals only.

Survey/commissioning journals set a dierent problem. They attract many citations but articles often benet from a specic refereeing process and, more importantly, their object itself is responsible for part of this citations for reasons that dier from other journals (typically not a pure and original research contribution). We identify 41 survey/commissioning journals (see Appendix for the complete list) using the journals aims and scope we found on the web. We do not exclude them from the analysis but systematically downgrade their rank by dividing their econ by three (as if they received one third of their citations). From now on and until the nal ranking, we exclude the survey/commissioning journals from the Tables. 6 reveals the disparity between journal's authors. For Econometrica the average author has published 80% of his/her work in the JCReconomics category. At the other extreme, J. of the American Statistical Asso. or American Political Science Review have an econ percentage of 20% only. Journals which are in the JCR economics category do not all have a large econ percentage. For example, J. of Financial Economics's econ is 0.53, or J. of Accounting and Economics's econ is 0.47.

Citations from Google Scholar

Nowadays, the JCR is no longer the only source of citation information. For instance, RePEc as well as Scopus, which are online bibliographic databases in economics, provide citation analysis both at the author and journal levels. Admittedly, the broadest provider of citation information on the web is Google Scholar. The quality of the information provided by Google Scholar is quite high. It is, however, less sophisticated than JCR. In particular, it reects citations available today on the internet and it is therefore subject to possible uctuations in the very short-run, for example, as soon as citing articles are put and removed from the web. Importantly, Google Scholar has not beneted from the computations of inuence index taking into account the quality of the citing support (whihc would me more tedious given the non-homogeneity of this support. Therefore, we are obliged to only use the raw Google Scholar citations equivalent to the basic JCR impact factor. This can be seen as an advantage for those who do like the article inuence approach. However, the obvious advantage of Google Scholar is that it consider citations from a much larger set of supports that include for instance working papers or book chapters.

13

Thanks to Google Scholar, we can have for every EconLit journal the complete list of its articles published during a given time period cited on the web. By adding these citations, we have for each journal the total number of citations its articles received (say during the last 5 years). By dividing this total number by the number of articles (which we have in EconLit in order to take into account the zerocited articles) we nd the average number of citation per article for each EconLit journals. Instead of summing citations we can compute also the h-index (Hirsh index 14 , see [START_REF] Hirsch | An index to quantify an individual's scientic research output[END_REF]) of every journals. Table 7 shows the correlations between the rough (not yet normalized by econ) Google Scholar indexes and the four main JCR indexes. We opt for the use of the last ve year h-index, H5. The main reason is that more and more bibliometric works use h-indexes because they represent a good intermediate choice to value both the volume of citations and citations per articles, when information is available, instead of averaging the two as we did for JCR indexes. A ve-years is more interesting than a ten-year one that would have defavorize journals younger than 10 years. Finally, we use again econ to keep the focus on economics journals.

H5_econ = rank (econ × H5)

Table 8 shows the rst 60 journals according to the H5 e con (survey/commissioning journals excluded). Some journals are in EconLit but not in JCR, which prevents us from computing their JCR indexes but which can be benet from Google Scholar indexes. Only one such a journal, represented in normal font, is present in Table 8 but others could be found below at ranks higher than JCR journals. That such journals are few is a good indication that the JCR economics category contains, indeed, the most cited economics journals. One could argue that we multiply the h-index by econ which tends to reduce the rank of non JCR journals. In fact, even if we do not take econ into account, only 7 non JCR journals are found in the top 100.

JEL code normalized rankings

When the discussion comes to citation analysis, a leitmotiv among academics is that their eld is penalized because of dierent habits: people in other elds cite one another much more and citation counts are inated. A second complaint is that their eld is less fashionable right now that such other eld and that again the citation count is biased as it does not reect only quality but also fashion.

It is very dicult to disentangle quality from fashion in the citation data. We propose, however, a (certainly imperfect) method to normalize citation counts across elds based on the JEL codes observed on publications. In short, we compute a within-eld citation index by simply dividing the score of an article (the score of its journal as we have not the information at the article level) by the average (over all EconLit) score of an article that would share exactly the same JEL codes. We obtain the journal index by summing this normalized score over all its articles. This implicitly assumes that the quality does not depend on the eld and that existing dierences between elds on average over all their publications are only due to fashion eects or habits. To correctly compare publications in dierent elds one has therefore to rule out such aggregate dierences. This (extreme) point of view is polar to the standard approach that ignores habits and fashion eects and assumes any variation in citations comes from a dierence of quality. Again, we choose to average the two approaches in our nal index, such that balancing the two points of view.

More precisely, let us imagine we have the citations of each EconLit article. We rst distribute these citations among the various JEL codes of the publication. For example, if an article has 5 JEL codes and 10 citations, each JEL codes receives two citations. Then to obtain the total number of citation received for a given JEL code (there are 778 JEL codes at the three digit level) we would sum over all EconLit publication. We are, however, interested in per article citations. Therefore we divide this sum by the sum of the fraction of article in which the JEL code appear. For example, if a JEL code appear in two articles once with another JEL code, the other with 2 others, we divide by 1/2 + 1/3 articles. Unfortunately, we do not have, the number of citations at the article level. Moreover we do not want to apply this normalization directly to the raw citations but to the sophisticated JCR indexes. Let X ∈ {PII, AI, JII, EF }, for an article a (an article is characterized by its journal, its publication year, and its length measured in page number), let x(a) be the score according to X of the journal in which a is published. Let p(a) denote the number of pages of a and let p(a) denote the average number of pages of the articles published the same year in the same journal as a. Finally, let k(a) denote the number of JEL codes of a. We approximate the contribution of a in terms of X to each one of its JEL codes as:

s(a, X) = p(a) p(a) x(a)/k(a)
An article longer (resp. shorter) than the average receive a larger (resp. smaller) share of x, which is a standard practice in bibliometrics. We choose to do it here within each journal-year, the implicit assumption being that within the same year and the same journal, editors should be consistent accepting longer papers only if they contribute more. Weighting by the number of pages would correspond to a much stronger assumption, which is rst that pages are comparable across journals and second that editors are also consistent over time. As we cannot distinguish among the JEL codes of a which one contributed more to the visibility of a, we treat each JEL code similarly and attribute them an even share of x(a) by dividing by k(a).

For a time period T , let A(c, T ) denote the set of articles in which the JEL code c appears during period T . Let

s(c, T, X) = a∈A(c,T ) s(a, X) a∈A(c,T ) 1/k(a)
for a given index X and a given period T . It represents the expected X score of a publication which would have c as its lone JEL code. These s(c, T, X) vary from one JEL code to another reecting the fact that some JEL code attract more citations that others on average over all EconLit. Let us make the very extreme assumption that these variations are not due to the intrinsic quality of the articles but only to fashion. To put it dierently, without the fashion eect, for all c = c we would have s(c, T, X) = s(c , T, X). To correct for this assumed fashion eect we normalize as follows the score of any article a. Let C(a) denote the set of JEL codes which appears in a.

norm(a, T, X)

= c∈C(a) s(a, X) s(c, T, X) = s(a, X) c∈C(a) 1 s(c, T, X)
that is if we only knew the JEL codes of a, then (without any fashion eect) the expected (average) score of a according to X for time period T would be norm(a, T, X). Finally we can aggregate this normalized score at the journal level: let J(T ) denote the set of articles of journal j for period T and let N j (T ) denote the total number of articles published in j during T . The score of journal j according to X normalized by JEL codes is denoted X_N orm j , given by :

X_N orm j = 1 N j (T ) a∈J(T )
norm(a, T, X)

Then we average as previously the four citation indexes, PII, AI, JII, EF, normalized by JEL codes to obtain our normalized summary index:

JCR_Norm_econ = X∈{PII,AI,JII,EF } rank (econ × X_N orm) /4
where the average is taken on the ranks not the scores. That is, econ × PII_Norm is the rank of the journal for the variable econ × PII_Norm.

Table 9 shows the rst 60 journals according to the JCR_Norm_econ index (survey/commissioning journals excluded). In comparison with Table 6 some journals hardly move while others experience greater variations. Among the journals that benet the most of the normalization are the following Nature journals: 15 Agricultural Economics, Ecological Economics, Food Policy, Energy Economics, and American Journal of Agricultural Economics which win at least 30 ranks. Moderate gains are obtained for Journal of Comparative Economics (+14), J. of Development Economics (+12) and J. of Urban Economics (+12). On the contrary, nance journals lose ranks, e.g. Journal of Financial Markets loses 52 ranks, Journal of Financial Intermediation or Finance and Stochastics lose about 30 ranks. Some nance journals are, however, little aected by the normalization as the J. of Finance (-2) or the J. of Financial Economics (-1).

15 These journals are not necessarily in the Tables as their ranks can be larger than 60. We have presented so far three dierent dimensions of journals quality. First, the JCR citation sophisticated indexes, second the Google Scholar h-index, and nally the JEL code normalized JCR indexes.

In each case, to keep the emphasis on economics, the indexes are corrected by the econ percentage.

Each of these approaches has its pros and cons. In order not to discard any relevant information and

to keep an open minded point of view, we propose an index which is a weighted average of these three types of indexes:

CL-index = 0.5JCR_econ + 0.25H5_econ + 0.25JCR_N orm_econ

(1)
A larger weight is put on the JCR_econ index because it is the most traditional approach (except for the econ correction). Then the two other alternatives are given an equal weight, and in total they have the same weight as the JCR_econ index. Changing marginally these weights little aects the ranking, as shown in Section 10.5. 8 Prediction for the non-JCR journals So far, the approach followed only allows us to rank the 304 journals that are both in JCR and EconLit. Since our goal is to rank all 1202 EconLit journals, we need to extend the previous methodology to the remaining 898 journals.

Hopefully, the richness of the EconLit database allows us to recover the missing citation scores. Indeed, EconLit provides us with the publication record of every authors. Therefore for each citation index X ∈ {PII, AI, JII, EF }, we can compute the publication score of every authors according to X.

Next, by averaging the authors' score for all the authors of a given journal we derive the score of every journal according to the publication intensity (measured by X) of its authors. This procedure is detailed in Section 8.1. Once these journal-author scores are obtained they are used to predict the missing citation scores, as explained in Section 8.2

Authors' scores

Let au denote an EconLit author (that is someone who is the (co)author of at least one article referenced in EconLit). Let A(au, T ) denote the set of all period T publications (co)authored by au. For a citation index X ∈ {PII, AI, JII, EF }, the score of this author is:

sc(au, X, T ) = a∈A(au,T ) p(a) p(a)
x(a)/n(a)

where x(a) is the score according to X of the journal in which a is published, p(a) the number of pages of a, p(a) the average number of pages of the articles published the same year in the same journal as a, and n(a) is the number of author of a. We discussed above the way we weight the articles length. We make the further normalisation here that is very standard to attribute to each of the n(a) co-authors a share 1 n(a) of the paper.

To move from authors' scores to journals' scores, let AU j (T ) denote the set of the authors of journal j during period T . The score of j according to X is:

sc j (X, T ) = au∈AU j (T )
w j (au, T )sc(au, X, T ) where w j (au, T ) is the weight of author au in journal j. This weight is the fraction of articles (co)authored by au. If an article has n(a) (co)authors, each one is author of 1/n(a) fraction of the article. Let A j (au, T ) denote the set of articles (co)authored by au in journal j during period T ,

w j (au, T ) = 1 N j (T ) a∈A j (au,T ) 1/n(a)
where N j (T ) is the total number of articles published in journal j during T .

Let us dene AU _X denote the list of the journals scores for period T = 2004 -2008 and JCR index X, sc j (X, 2004 -2008), according to the score of their authors. 16 We nally correct these AU _X indexes by econand average over the four JCR indexes we consider to get journal scores based on their authors performance, which gives AUT_econ = X∈{PII,AI,JII,EF } rank (econ × AU _X ) /4

16 We could have chosen other periods, but they have a similar explanatory power when explaining journals citations.

20

Contrary to JCR_econ, the index AUT _econ is available for all 1202 journals (whether they are active or not). Table 11 shows the rst 60 journals according to the AUT _econ index (survey/commissioning journals excluded). The column Delta indicates the change in rank with respect to the ranking of Table 6 (based on JCR_econ). It invites several comments. First, three non JCR journals make it to the top-60, the J. of the European Economic Association, Theoretical Economics, and Econometric Reviews. Similarly, Experimental Economics was not ranked previously because it is a recent JCR journal (not in the economics category though) and it does not have a score for PII and JII. Second, the rank of a journal can vary substantially between the JCR_econ ranking and the AU _econ one. Econometrica is rst in both rankings, but there are some impressive upwards movements for example: Economic Theory gains 28 ranks and National Tax Journal 24. Conversely, J. of Accounting and Economics loses 22 ranks and J. of Environmental Economics and Management 15. These variations show that one cannot simply substitute a citation index by an author index. However the correlation between the two indexes is relatively high (0.88) and the author information is certainly useful to predict the missing citations.

This is what we exploit in the next section, given that we also apply the same procedure to construct the similar scores based on JEL normalized scores, which gives AUT _Norm_econ.

Econometric estimation

For the 304 JCR journals, we have both citation and author indexes. Let AUT-index be dened by AUT-index = 0.5AUT_econ + 0.25H5_econ + 0.25AUT_N orm_econ with AUT-index j be the value of the AUT-index for journal j.

The specication we consider is:

CL-index = δ + α X∈{PII,AI,JII,EF } X_econ + β X∈{PII,AI,JII,EF } X_N orm_econ

+γH5_econ + 4 k=2 δ k AUT-index k + ε (2)
where δ, α, β, γ, δ 2 , δ 3 , and δ 4 are parameters to be estimated and ε is and error term supposed to be independently and identically distributed across journals.

Table 12 presents OLS estimates of specication (2). A majority of the authors' scores based on the indexes entering CL-index signicantly aect CL-index. This is also the case for the powers of AUTindex. Since our purpose is to built a good predictor of CL-index for the non-JCR journals, the most important criteria is the R 2 . It appears that the t is pretty good, with a R 2 at 0.97. This also reects in the gure in the right-hand part of Table 12 where real and predicted points for JCR are shown. Indeed as we average ranks and not (normalized) scores, the estimated index is increasing (the lower the index the better the journal) and almost linear. First, it is more useful to have decreasing weights (in order to weight publications before summing them, for example). Second, and most importantly, [START_REF] Lotka | The frequency distribution of scientic productivity[END_REF] was the rst to realize that the distribution of scientic publications is very skewed. It has been conrmed since that this holds for most scientic production, indexes, and elds. To put it in another way, when individuals (people, organizations, journals, etc) are ranked by decreasing productivity, the productivity decreases sharply, in a very convex way, typically of the exponential form:

logX j = a + b log (rank(X j )) + ν j
where X j is a journal index, rank(X j ) the rank of this journal according to X j and ν j an error term supposed to be independently and identically distributed across journals.

Therefore, the choice of a one to one function to transform the estimated index into decreasing weights gives us the opportunity to shape the degree of convexity (inequality) of the journal weights, keeping the same ordinal ranking of journals. Our rst variant uses the function 1/(x + 20) (and normalizes the top score to 100). This leads to the index we call CLm for Combes-Linnemer medium (convexity). Our second variant is the index CLh for Combes-Linnemer high (convexity). It uses the function 1/(x+20) 3 (and normalizes the top score to 100). Their formal denitions for any journal j are given by

       CLm j = 100 CL-indexmax+20 CL-index j +20
and

CLh j = 100 CL-indexmax+20 CL-index j +20 3 if j ∈ JCR CLm j = 100 CL-indexmax+20 CL-index j +20
and

CLh j = 100 CL-indexmax+20 CL-index j +20 3 ifj ∈ JCR
where CL -index j is the value of the CL-index for journal j and CL -index max , the maximum of these values.

Finally, we also propose discrete weights as the literature does, often because it is not able to do more contrary to us. We consider six classes with weights that decrease by a factor 2 between two consecutive classes. We call this index CLd for Combes-Linnemer discrete. 17

To understand these choices, and as a comparison device, Table 13 ranks a number of standard indexes from the lowest to the highest convexity, given by the absolute value of the parameter b (second column). The least convex index corresponds to the one used by the French Cnrs. Then, H-indexes computed from GS citations, Scopus, or Repec, or the Palacio-Huerta et Volij index, or AI lead to a convexity coecient between 0.7 and 1. There is then a group of indexes that are more convex with a convexity between 1.2 and 1.5 (Ritzberger, EF and the GS citations index per article). Finally, all other indexes are very convex, with a convexity coecient above 1.6, the GS indexes based on total citations reaching 2, passing by the Red Jasper indexes (per article and total) and by the Kodrzycki et Yu index. With a convexity coecient of 0.55, CLm is one of the indexes with the weakest convexity among standard citations indexes. The degree of convexity of CLh, on the other hand, is fairly high (but not the highest), at 1.66. As appears at the bottom of Table 13, the convexity of CLd is among the weakest, at -0.64.

One might be surprised by the low convexity coecient obtained for PHV, which is a fairly selective index since it considers a low number of journals. This is due to the fact that journals with a zero weight are omitted from the previous regression. To take into account these journals we introduce a very low weight for them and re-restimate the convexity paramater on the full set of all EconLit journals for all indexes. 18 Results are reported in Table 14.

Some indexes that do not seem very convex in Table 13 exhibit now a high convexity coecient.

The reason is that whereas the weights given to the non-zero journals are not very convex, these indexes 17 The top ve (or AAA) journals are given a weight 100, the next 15 (or AA) journals a weight 50, the ones in class A, 25, next 12.5 in class B, then 6.25 in class C, and 3.125 in class D. The main advantage of the discrete ranking is that it is more robust to small changes in the methodology. Its main drawback is that it introduces discrete jumps in weights, which is somewhat articial. Moreover, it creates an articial equality, among a given class, between the best and the worst journals.

18 Practically, the dependent variable is now log (0.01 + Xj) instead of log (Xj). 19 On the other hand, many journals are ignored. Therefore while a low weight journal is relatively close to a high weight one, zero weight journals are innitely away from these low weight journals. Indexes such as Red Jasper or Eigenfactor TM ones also ignore a large number of journals, but at least use fairly convex weights, which is more consistent.

The approach we propose is balanced. According to CLm (or CLd), no journal is ignored and an intermediate degree of convexity is considered. A complementary point of view is obtained through CLh as it is a more selective ranking.

CL200Final Ranking

Tables 15 to 19 list all 600 journals in classes AAA, A, B, and C as well as their rank, CLm, and CLh.

Information about the remaining 602 D journals is available upon request.

20

The rst visual observation one makes when looking at Tables 15 is that it is lled with bold journals (economics JCR category) 10 Robustness of the ranking

Correlation with other rankings

In this section we study the correlation of our ranking with several other journal rankings. It appears to be fairly high in any case. By comparison with Tables 2 and7, our ranking is less correlated with JCR ones than these rankings are between them (and similarly for the Google Scholar ones). CLm is, however, more correlated with JCR rankings and with Google Scholar ones than the JCR rankings are with Google Scholar ones. It is a further indication that our strategy balances the two approaches. The EconLit database has been able to include recently more journals than the JCR had, to which must be added the fact that ve years are needed to have JCR citation indexes. Consequently, the citation information provided by the JCR source regards relatively old (in terms of being in EconLit) journals.

EconLit-JCR journals are on average in the EconLit database since 23.5 years while EconLit-non JCR journals are on average in the EconLit database since 11.4 years. More generallyn Figure 3 shows that the whole age distribution is shifted to the right in the EconLit-JCR database (right panel).

One might fear that this selection problem aects our prediction. However, when we had age as an explanatory variable in regression (2) it is not signicant at the 5% level (though it is at the 10% level).

As expected the sign is negative (older journals have a lower (that is better) rank). The R 2 is almost unchanged.

The non inclusion of age in our prediction could have (slightly) biased the results in favor of young journals. For example, young journals could benet from a launching strategy: a renowned editor could attract articles form other top publishers and the journal could have very good authors' index during the rst year or two. If, however, these top economists only sent their medium quality articles to this journal, the launching eect fades away and the perceived quality diminishes. Tables 15 to 19 do not seem to show such a trend. On the contrary, the average journal age is 40 years for the AAA class, 32.4

for the AA, 27.8 among the A journals, 18.7 for the B group, 14.9 for the C journals, and 10.3 in the D class. Therefore, we do not think that omitting age (which could not be recovered for non JCR journals) from the regression is an issue.

Using scores instead of ranks

To construct our index, we average the ranks of journals according to various citation criteria. We could have instead taken the mean of the citation scores. To be added scores should be normalized, however, because they do not share the same range. For instance, we simply divided each score by its maximal value (and multiplied it by 100), but we could have also normalized their mean or their variance, the problem being that not all normalizations can be done simultaneously, which prevent from fully addressing this issue. The score based index accentuates dierences at the top. Indeed, citations scores are decreasing and quite convex so a small rank dierence at the top can imply a large dierence in terms of score. It is therefore reassuring that both rankings are very similar at the top. On the contrary, scores typically have a long tail at the bottom: bottom journals have small score dierences but they can still have large rank dierences. The rank based index is therefore more useful to discriminate among middle and low ranked journals.

Using the median instead of the mean

Another way to aggregate individual rankings is to use the median instead of the mean of the ranks. We redid our analysis using the median.

21 Results are almost identical. Overall, the Spearman correlation, for either CLm or CLh, is 0.99. There is no change at all at the top, all AAA and AA journals are the same in both rankings. Among A journals, only one dierence appears: The last A journal swap its place with the rst B journal.

21 Instead of dening JCR_econ (similarly for JCR_Norm_econ ) as mean (PII, AI, JII, EF ) it is dened as median (PII, AI, JII, EF ).

The nal index is still dened as CL-index = 0.5JCR_econ + 0.25H5_econ + 0.25JCR_N orm_econ.

Varying the index

Our nal ranking is based on CL-index which is (for the JCR journals) a weighted average of 9 individual ranks. The weights we give to each one might be perceived as subjective. We simply put more weight to the JCR average ranking and otherwise used symmetry but nevertheless dierent choices would have resulted in a dierent nal ranking. The question is to what extent.

To answer this question, we compare in Table 22 (Appendix B), for each journal, its class in our nal ranking with the class of the journal for many individual rankings. More precisely we indicate how many times a journal is in the AAA, AA, A, B, C or D class. For JCR journals, we use 17 individual rankings (8 econ JCR rankings, 8 econ authors rankings, and H5_econ ). For non-JCR journals, we use 9 individual rankings (8 econ authors rankings, and H5_econ ).

The results presented in Table 22 (Appendix B) show the robustness of our nal classes. For example, among the 17 available rankings Quarterly J. of Economics is 13 times in the AAA class and 4 times in the AA class. This approach reinforce our choice to limit the AAA class to ve journals: indeed in Table 15 and for CLm (the same applies to CLh) the score of Review of Economic Studies is 81 while the score of J. of Financial Economics is 80.6. That is, they are very close and one could argue in favor of including J. of Financial Economics in the AAA class. Table 22 (Appendix B) points, however, in the other direction: Review of Economic Studies is 9 times AAA, 6 times AA, and 2 times A but J. of Financial Economics is only 4 times AAA and 13 times AA. Therefore it is easier to argue in favor of Review of Economic Studies to be included in the AAA class rather than the J. of Financial Economics.

Several journals are remarkably stable across rankings. J. of Monetary Economics is 17 times in the AA class. J. of Health Economics, J. of Money, Credit, and Banking, J. of Urban Economics, J. of Applied Econometrics, among others, are 17 times in the A class. Overall, 70% of journals are more than 60% of time in the same class as their CL-index class. Only 9% of the journals are misallocated: they are in the same class as they CL-index one time out of three or less (for a JCR journal it means 5 times or less and 3 times or less for a non JCR journal). When a journal is misallocated it means it could either have been ranked higher or lower. The remaining 21% of journals have typically a larger variance in terms of rank/classes and their nal ranks/classes are more disputable. Among the AAA and AA no journal is misallocated in that sense. Among the A journals, three of them are: International Tax and Public Finance, J. of Economic Psychology, and J. of Risk and Insurance. They are more often (more than 65% of the times) in B than in A.

The general impression is that even if our weights in formula (1) are subjective they do not aect dramatically the nal ranking. In particular, small changes in these weights would not perturb our ranking by much. C.6 Nature: 67 journals (6.47%) This eld is further divided into three subelds: Agricultural ( 33 journals (3.19%)), Environmental ( 25 journals (2.42%)), and Energy ( 9 journals (0.87%)). 3 0.23 opec review 10 D 2.7 0.12 j. of energy and development 32 D 3.7 0.18 eco. and policy of energy and the envi. 5 D 10.3 0.04 pacic and asian j. of energy 14 D 5.4 0.2 Journals in bold are in the economics category of JCR. Survey journals are in small caps. Other JCR journals are in italic.

Journals marked with an * are no longer referenced in the EconLit database.

Figure 1

 1 Figure 1 depicts per year both the number of new journals (dark bars, axis on the left) and the total number of active journals (grey bars, axis on the right). The EconLit database started in 1969 with 145 2 The ocial web site is at: http://www.aeaweb.org/econlit/index.php 3 As an example the American Statistician has been referenced in EconLit only from February 1969 to December 1970. The most striking case is Transportation Journal for which EconLit contains only one article (published in 1971).

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Number of new journals and total number of journals per year

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: Share of each JEL code for year 2007

Figure 2

 2 Figure 2 depicts these shares for two years, 1991 and 2007. All JEL codes are not equally used. A rst group contains the four JEL codes with the largest shares (between 9 and 11%), G (Financial), O (Development and Growth ), L (Industrial Organization ), and D (Microeconomics). Combined they make up 40% of the EconLit articles. All of them, except D, increased their share between 1991 and 2007. A second group includes JEL codes with shares between 5 and 7% or ve domains: Q (Agricultural Environmental), J (Labour Demographic), F (International), E (Macro Monetary), and Y (Miscellaneous). Except the last one, their shares have decreased between 1991 and 20007. The total share of these ve codes amounts to 31%. The ve JEL codes with shares between 3 and 5% can be gathered in a third group with a cumulated share of 20%: R (Urban Regional), I (Health Education), C (Math Quantitative), H (Public), and M (Business Marketing), among which C and H saw their shares declined between 1991 and 2007. The remaining six JEL codes have shares between 0 and 3%, which all decreased between 1991 and 2008.

  , the census year being 2005. Forward indexes (e.g. citations obtained in years 2001 to 2005 by articles published in 2000) are also proposed. To make the two indexes we use as dierent as possible, capture dierent notions and somewhat get the best of two Worlds, we selected for Red Jasper since start for the publication window, and a self-citation weight of 1 (no discrimination against self-citations 11 ). Citations obtained in 2005 by any articles of a given journal during the census period count. For Eigenfactor TM we use the indexes for the last census year available that is 2006. Only citations in 2006 obtained by articles published over 2001-2005 count. The latter put the focus on recent publication. The advantage of the former is that journals which articles, for any reason, obtain citations only after a longer time period are considered.

13

  The best way to grasp the information provided by Google Scholar is to go to the advanced search section and to type a journal name in the publication box as well as a time span in the date boxes. For instance in January 2010, Econometrica and 2005-2009 returns 422 articles, the most cited with 744 citations, being Teachers, schools, and academic achievement by SG Rivkin, EA Hanushek, JF Kain published in March 2005. longer referenced in the EconLit database. Survey journals are excluded.

  must be tackled: to what extent are the weights given to the journals more or less selective?

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: EconLit age of journals included or not in SCI

  are in the economics category of JCR. Survey journals are in small caps. Other JCR journals are in italic.Journals marked with an * are no longer referenced in the EconLit database.

  site. 8 Ba- sically they both provide two main rankings. The rst ones denoted JII at Red Jasper and Eigenfactor TM Score (hereafter EF) at Eigenfactor TM measure the overall inuence of the journals. In particular, if a journal doubles in size while the quality of its articles remains constant, both Eigenfactor TM Score and JII double. The second ones, denoted PII and Article Inuence TM Score (hereafter AI) respectively, are proportional to the average inuence per article published, i.e. JII and EFdivided by the number of articles. Interestingly, while top journals in economics such as Quarterly J. of Economics, American Economic Review, or Econometrica lie well beyond Nature or Science in terms of overall inuence, JII or

EF, they get values for indexes per article (PII or Article Inuence TM Score) very close to those of these

Table 1 :

 1 JCR citation indexes

	EF and AI (Eigenfactor TM ) JII and PII (Red Jasper) KMS KY Econ J. and A.-level KY All J-and A.-level KY Policy J-and A.-level PH-V Ritzberger EF and AI (JCR)	Nb of journals 303 296 159 181 181 181 34 205 304	Cited journals JCR ∩ EconLit JCR ∩ EconLit Econ-JCR ad hoc Econ-JCR ad hoc Econ-JCR econ j. + 43 policy j. Citing journals All JCR All JCR these 159 j. these 181 j. ad hoc Econ-JCR 87 policy j. ad hoc list these 34 j. ad hoc Econ-JCR these 205 j. JCR ∩ EconLit All JCR	Self-citation Window Census Year excluded 2001/05 2006 included All years 2005 excluded 1994/98 1998 excluded 1996/03 2003 excluded 1996/03 2003 excluded 1996/03 2003 excluded 1993/99 2000 excluded 2003/05 2005 excluded 2002/06 2007

As both Red Jasper and Eigenfactor TM rank all journals from all disciplines, these rankings are the ones in which we can nd the largest number of journals. A nal advantage of these rankings is that they have not been established by economists nor for economists. 9 To understand the logic behind these indicators, the following quote from Bergstrom, West, et Wiseman is useful:

  proceeds to the journal that was cited, selects a random 2006 article from that journal and, as before, selects a citation to direct her to her next journal volume. The researcher does this ad innitum. Because of the structure of the citation network, our model researcher will frequently visit large, important journals such as Nature or Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, and will seldom visit small journals in the lowest tiers of the publishing hierarchy. The frequency with which our model researcher visits each journal gives us a measure of that journal's importance within network of academic citations and this frequency, expressed as a percentage, is essentially the Eigenfactor Score of the journal.

8 See http://www.eigenfactor.org/. 9 Admittedly, Ted Bergstrom is professor of economics and he is part of the Eigenfactor TM project. then

Table 2 :

 2 Correlations Between Raw Citation indexes

		PII	EF	AI	RZ	PHV	KY
	Red Jasper total (JII)	0.95	0.89	0.82	0.78	0.75	0.89
	Red Jasper per article (PII)	1	0.78	0.85	0.82	0.79	0.91
	Eigenfactor total (EF)		1	0.87	0.74	0.65	0.85
	Eigenfactor per article (AI)			1	0.82	0.73	0.90
	Ritzberger (RZ)				1	0.80	0.87
	Palacio-Huerta and Volij (PHV)					1	0.78
	Kodrzycki and Yu (KY)						1

Table 3 :

 3 Top 25 journals for the main four JCR rankings

	Red Jasper PII	Red Jasper JII
	Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 j. of business and eco. statistics 26 20.88 Journal Age Score econometrica 40 100 j. of political economy 40 99.87 quarterly j. of economics 40 91.15 brookings p. on eco. activity 39 66.49 j. of the american statistical asso. 40 58.73 review of economic studies 40 54.79 j. of economic literature 40 44.59 j. of nance 40 40.51 american economic review 40 35.24 american political science review 40 34.6 j. of nancial economics 35 34.21 rand j. of economics 25 25.26 j. of economic theory 40 23.62 j. of monetary economics 34 22.2 review of nancial studies 20 21.35 17 j. of econometrics 30 20.75 18 j. of economic perspectives 22 19.27 19 j. of law and economics 40 18.9 20 international orga. 24 18.25 21 international economic review 40 17.47 22 r. of economics and statistics 40 17.3 23 j. of accounting and economics 30 14.67 24 j. of labor economics 26 14.57 25 j. of economic growth 13 13.78 Eigenfactor TM AI	Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 j. of business and eco. statistics 26 9.9 Journal Age Score econometrica 40 100 american economic review 40 87.72 j. of the american statistical asso. 40 85.7 j. of political economy 40 69.54 quarterly j. of economics 40 54.01 j. of nance 40 53.41 review of economic studies 40 34.5 j. of nancial economics 35 34.46 j. of economic theory 40 33.15 j. of econometrics 30 25.75 american political science review 40 21.27 j. of monetary economics 34 20.88 r. of economics and statistics 40 18.59 economic journal 40 14.7 j. of public economics 36 14.09 review of nancial studies 20 12.81 rand j. of economics 25 12.63 international economic review 40 12.62 j. of economic literature 40 12.06 games and economic behavior 20 11.94 j. of economic perspectives 22 11.84 23 j. of inter. economics 38 9.71 24 european economic review 36 9.47 25 economics letters 21 7.91 Eigenfactor TM EF
	Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 j. of business and eco. statistics 26 20.42 Journal Age Score quarterly j. of economics 40 100 j. of economic literature 40 71.73 j. of political economy 40 58.29 j. of nance 40 49.64 econometrica 40 49.58 j. of nancial economics 35 47.85 review of economic studies 40 42.61 review of nancial studies 20 38.84 j. of economic perspectives 22 35.71 review of accounting studies 13 34.65 j. of accounting and economics 30 34.38 american economic review 40 33.87 american political science review 40 33.03 brookings p. on eco. activity 39 28.8 j. of economic growth 13 26.62 j. of labor economics 26 26.17 j. of monetary economics 34 24.45 r. of economics and statistics 40 23.53 j. of the american statistical asso. 40 23.39 international orga. 24 22.91 j. of accounting research 38 22.67 rand j. of economics 25 21.14 economic journal 40 20.47 25 j. of economic theory 40 20.02 Journals in bold are in the economics category of JCR. Survey/commissioning journals are in small caps. Other JCR journals are in italic. Rank Journal Age Score 1 american economic review 40 100 2 j. of nance 40 72.77 3 quarterly j. of economics 40 68.39 4 econometrica 40 56.4 5 j. of nancial economics 35 53.95 6 j. of political economy 40 45.78 7 j. of the american statistical asso. 40 40.47 8 j. of economic theory 40 31.58 9 review of economic studies 40 29.71 10 r. of economics and statistics 40 28.44 11 review of nancial studies 20 26.3 12 j. of economic perspectives 22 26.23 13 j. of econometrics 30 25.38 14 economic journal 40 25.29 15 j. of monetary economics 34 25.25 16 american political science review 40 24.15 17 j. of public economics 36 22.55 18 j. of economic literature 40 22.1 19 european economic review 36 20.48 20 j. of inter. economics 38 17.19 21 economics letters 21 15.92 22 international economic review 40 15.61 23 games and economic behavior 20 15.03 24 rand j. of economics 25 14.67 25 j. of labor economics 26 14.62

  Table 4 lists the 60 rst journals according to this JCR index. It is important to keep in mind that the intersection of the JCR and EconLit databases contains only 304 journals (out of which are no longer in EconLit).

Table 4 :

 4 Top 60 journals for the JCR index For some academics in economics, Table4may look awkward as many journals which at rst sight are not in the economics core elds make it to the top. Visually this intuition is captured by the italic font: journals in italic (in all Tables of this article) are in JCR but not in the economics category of the JCR. Journals in bold are. Both the JCR and the EconLit databases hold journals that are not 100%

	Journal Rank Score econometrica 1 2.75 quarterly j. of economics 2 3 j. of political economy 3 3.75 j. of nance 4 5 american economic review 5 6 j. of nancial economics 6 7.75 review of economic studies 7 7.75 j. of the american statistical asso. 8 8.75 j. of economic literature 9 12 review of nancial studies 10 13 american political science review 11 13 j. of economic theory 12 14.25 j. of monetary economics 13 j. of accounting and economics 23 26.75 j. of inter. economics 24 27.5 j. of public economics 25 29.5 brookings p. on eco. activity 26 31.75 european economic review 27 32.25 games and economic behavior 28 33 j. of business* 29 35.75 j. of accounting research 30 39	Journal Rank Score demography 31 j. of n. and quanti. analysis 32 40.75 j. of consumer research 33 41.75 j. of health economics 34 45.25 j. of economic growth 35 45.5 j. of law and economics 36 45.5 j. of human resources 37 45.75 j. of money, credit, and banking 38 47.75 accounting review 39 52.5 j. of industrial economics 40 54.75 yale law journal 41 55.5 econometric theory 42 55.75 j. of law, eco., and orga. 43 j. of urban economics 44 57.25 j. of the royal statistical society: series a 45 57.5 j. of development economics 46 58.5 j. of applied econometrics 47 review of economic dynamics 48 60.5 mathematical nance 49 62.25 population and dev. review 50 62.25 marketing science 51 j. of risk and uncertainty 52 63.75 nance and stochastics 53 j. of eco. dyna. and control 54 industrial and labor relations review 55 world bank economic review 56 j. of env. eco. and manag. 57 70.75 j. of eco. and manag. strategy 58 70.75 j. of eco. behavior and orga. 59 71.75 world development 60
	Journals in bold are in the economics category of JCR. Survey/commissioning journals are in small caps. Other JCR journals are in italic. J. of Business is marked with an * because it stopped being published in 2006.

Table 5 :

 5 Distribution of the share of economists (econ ) for each journal category

	Journals	Obs.	Mean	Std.	P10	P25	P50	P70	P80	P90	P95	P99
	Not in JCR	885	0.18	0.14	0.03	0.07	0.15	0.23	0.30	0.38	0.46	0.64
	JCR non economics	138	0.16	0.10	0.06	0.09	0.13	0.18	0.24	0.34	0.39	0.46
	JCR economics	157	0.68	0.07	0.59	0.65	0.69	0.72	0.74	0.77	0.80	0.82

Table 6 :

 6 Top 60 journals for the JCR_econ index Journals in bold are in the economics category of JCR. Other JCR journals are in italic. Journals marked with an * are no longer referenced in the EconLit database. Survey journals are excluded.

	Journal Rank Score econ econometrica 1 2 0.8 quarterly j. of economics 2 2.5 0.76 j. of political economy 3 2.75 0.75 american economic review 4 3.5 0.73 review of economic studies 5 5.25 0.8 j. of nancial economics 6 6.75 0.53 j. of nance
	world development 50 55.25 0.62 health economics 51 55.5 0.67 economica 52 57.75 0.7 inter. j. of industrial orga. 53 59.25 0.71 oxford economic papers 54 59.5 0.67 national tax journal 55 60.5 0.72 inter. j. of game theory 56 62.5 0.78 american j. of agri. eco. 57 64 0.69 explorations in eco. history 58 65.25 0.72 economic inquiry 59 65.5 0.69 canadian j. of economics 60 66 0.69

Table 6

 6 shows the rst 60 journals according to the JCR_econ index (survey/commissioning journals excluded). It shows that bold journals are more dominant than in Table4, which was expected. The column econ in Table

Table 7 :

 7 Correlations Between Citation indexes

	Index	GS5p	HGS5	GS10t	GS10p	HGS10	JII	PII	EF	AI
	GS total 5 years (GSt5)	0.91	0.71	0.97	0.89	0.64	0.73	0.59	0.82	0.66
	GS per article 5 years (GSp5)	1	0.89	0.87	0.93	0.77	0.59	0.59	0.64	0.68
	H-index GS 5 years (HGS5)		1	0.67	0.82	0.87	0.32	0.45	0.32	0.53
	GS total 10 years (GSt10)			1	0.90	0.64	0.74	0.62	0.83	0.66
	GS per article 10 years (GSp10)				1	0.86	0.60	0.61	0.65	0.68
	H-index GS 10 years (HGS10)					1	0.33	0.46	0.34	0.55

Table 9 :

 9 Top 60 journals for the JCR_Norm_econ index

	Journal Rank Score econ quarterly j. of economics 1 2.5 0.76 american economic review 2 3.25 0.73 econometrica 3 3.5 0.8 j. of political economy 4 4.5 0.75 j. of economic theory 5 8.5 0.81 j. of nancial economics 6 9.5 0.53 review of economic studies 7 10 0.8 j. of monetary economics 8 10 0.71 r. of economics and statistics 9 12.25 0.69 j. of nance 10 12.5 0.37 economic journal 11 13.75 0.7 j. of econometrics 12 14.5 0.72 j. of public economics 13 15.25 0.75 rand j. of economics 14 17.5 0.77 j. of inter. economics 15 18.5 0.72 international economic review 16 20 0.77 european economic review 17 21.25 0.68 j. of business and eco. statistics 18 25.5 0.66 games and economic behavior 19 25.5 0.81 j. of labor economics 20

Table 10

 10 presents the rst 60 journals according to the CL-index (survey/commissioning journals excluded). The column Delta indicates the change in rank with respect to the ranking ofTable 6 (based on JCR_econ only).

Table 10 :

 10 Top 60 journals for the CL-index (JCR journals only) +1 j. of common market studies 60 68.88 +14 Journals in bold are in the economics category of JCR. Other JCR journals are in italic. Journals marked with an * are no longer referenced in the EconLit database. Survey journals are excluded.

	Journal Rank Score Delta quarterly j. of economics 1 2.38 +1 american economic review 2 2.81 +2 j. of political economy 3 3.25 0 econometrica 4 3.38 -3 review of economic studies 5 7.63 0 j. of nancial economics 6 7.75 0 j. of monetary economics 7 9.5 +2 r. of economics and statistics 8 10.19 +2 j. of economic theory 9 10.75 -2 j. of nance 10 11 -3 j. of econometrics 11 12.63 0 economic journal 12 14.69 +1 rand j. of economics 13 15.13 -1 j. of public economics 14 16.06 +3 j. of inter. economics 15 16.38 +4 european economic review 16 20.56 +5 j. of labor economics 17 20.63 -2 international economic review 18 20.88 -4 games and economic behavior 19 21.38 -1 review of nancial studies 20 25.56 0 j. of business and eco. statistics 21 26.5 -5 j. of health economics 22 30.94 +4 j. of development economics 23 32.38 +14 j. of human resources 24 33.06 +3 j. of money, credit, and banking 25 33.44 +3 j. of law and economics 26 34.94 -1 j. of accounting and economics 27 35.25 -4 j. of urban economics 28 36 +4 j. of env. eco. and manag. 29 39.5 +12 j. of economic growth 30 39.81 -6	Journal Rank Score Delta j. of eco. dyna. and control 31 42 +9 j. of eco. behavior and orga. 32 42.44 +14 world development 33 42.5 +17 review of economic dynamics 34 43.44 -4 j. of applied econometrics 35 43.88 0 economic theory 36 45.75 +7 econometric theory 37 46.38 -8 j. of law, eco., and orga. 38 49.81 -4 health economics 39 51.13 +12 american j. of agri. eco. 40 51.25 +17 j. of industrial economics 41 51.94 -8 inter. j. of industrial orga. 42 52.13 +11 j. of economic history 43 52.25 +4 economics letters 44 53.69 +5 j. of risk and uncertainty 45 54.5 -7 scandinavian j. of economics 46 54.63 +2 j. of n. and quanti. analysis 47 55.38 -11 ecological economics 48 55.75 +20 j. of mathematical economics 49 55.81 -10 j. of business* 50 56.69 -6 j. of eco. and manag. strategy 51 59 -9 oxford economic papers 52 59.38 +2 j. of the american statistical asso. 53 59.44 -31 mathematical nance 54 60.25 -9 economica 55 62.13 -3 public choice 56 62.63 +6 american political science review 57 64.13 -26 j. of banking and nance 58 65.06 +12 canadian j. of economics 59 66.5

Table 11 :

 11 Top 60 journals for the AUT _econ index

	Journal Rank Score Delta econometrica 1 3.25 0 american economic review 2 3.75 +2 quarterly j. of economics 3 5 -1 j. of economic theory 4 6.75 +3 j. of political economy 4 6.75 -1 j. of nancial economics 6 7.25 0 j. of econometrics 7 9.25 +4 review of economic studies 8 9.5 -3 j. of monetary economics 9 10.5 0 rand j. of economics 10 14 +2 games and economic behavior 11 15.5 +7 international economic review 12 15.75 +2 j. of nance 12 15.75 -5 j. of public economics 14 17.25 +3 r. of economics and statistics 15 18 -5 j. of the european eco. association 16 21 . economic theory 17 23.25 +26 econometric theory 18 24.75 +11 economic journal 19 26 -6 j. of business and eco. statistics 19 26 -3 review of economic dynamics 21 26.5 +9 review of nancial studies 22 27.5 -2 j. of labor economics 23 27.75 -8 j. of inter. economics 24 29 -5 european economic review 25 29.75 -4 j. of money, credit, and banking 26 34 +2 j. of human resources 27 34.25 0 j. of mathematical economics 28 35.25 +11 j. of the american statistical asso. 29 38 -7 j. of eco. dyna. and control 30 38.25 +10	Journal Rank Score Delta j. of health economics 41.5 -5 j. of applied econometrics 42 +3 j. of eco. and manag. strategy 42.25 +9 national tax journal 42.75 +21 j. of development economics 43.5 +2 j. of law and economics 43.5 -10 j. of n. and quanti. analysis 44 -1 j. of economic growth 45 -14 j. of law, eco., and orga. 45.5 -5 j. of urban economics 48 -8 j. of risk and uncertainty 48.5 -3 inter. j. of game theory 48.75 +14 macroeconomic dynamics 49.25 +22 j. of industrial economics 49.75 -11 j. of accounting and economics 50 -22 economics letters 50.75 +3 inter. j. of industrial orga. 51.5 +6 scandinavian j. of economics 51.5 +1 j. of eco. behavior and orga. 52.25 -3 j. of business* 54.5 -6 economic inquiry 54.75 +8 canadian j. of economics 57.25 +8 social choice and welfare 58.25 +22 j. of economic history 58.75 -7 theoretical economics 62.5 68 -16 labour economics 70.25 +21 economica 71.75 -7 experimental economics 74.5

. econometric reviews 66.75 . j. of env. eco. and manag.

. Journals in bold are in the economics category of JCR. Other JCR journals are in italic. Journals marked with an * are no longer referenced in the EconLit database. Survey journals are excluded.

Table 12 :

 12

Regression analysis (N = 278) Variables Coef. (s.e.) (AU index ) 2

Table 13 :

 13 Convexity of Journal Indexes without zeros

	Index	convexity	Std. dev.	intercept	Std. dev.	obs.	R 2
	Cnrs	-0.29 a	(0.009)	5.08 a	(0.041)	401	0.73
	H-index Scopus	-0.88 a	(0.022)	7.05 a	(0.121)	556	0.74
	H-index GS tot. -5 years	-0.94 a	(0.016)	7.44 a	(0.094)	1015	0.78
	Palacio-Huerta and Volij	-0.96 a	(0.069)	5.32 a	(0.188)	34	0.86
	H-index GS tot. -10 years	-1.02 a	(0.018)	7.77 a	(0.106)	1069	0.76
	Eigenfactor per article	-1.05 a	(0.028)	6.42 a	(0.136)	302	0.82
	H-index Repec	-1.05 a	(0.020)	6.95 a	(0.106)	465	0.85
	Ritzberger	-1.21 a	(0.046)	6.36 a	(0.190)	154	0.82
	Eigenfactor total	-1.27 a	(0.031)	6.88 a	(0.149)	302	0.85
	GS cit. per art. -5 years	-1.48 a	(0.032)	9.13 a	(0.193)	963	0.68
	GS cit. per art. -10 years	-1.56 a	(0.034)	8.30 a	(0.205)	1022	0.67
	Red Jasper per article	-1.61 a	(0.042)	7.83 a	(0.203)	292	0.83
	Kodrzycki and Yu	-1.64 a	(0.067)	7.81 a	(0.287)	175	0.78
	Red Jasper total	-1.79 a	(0.044)	8.03 a	(0.210)	291	0.85
	GS tot. cit. -5 years	-1.94 a	(0.036)	10.55 a	(0.217)	1015	0.74
	GS tot. cit. -5 years	-2.09 a	(0.040)	11.00 a	(0.241)	1069	0.72
	Combes-Linnemer medium	-0.58 a	(0.002)	5.51 a	(0.011)	1168	0.99
	Combes-Linnemer discrete	-0.65 a	(0.003)	5.35 a	(0.019)	1207	0.97
	Combes-Linnemer high	-1.74 a	(0.006)	7.32 a	(0.034)	1168	0.99

ignore many journals. An extreme example is given by the Palacios-Huerta and Volij index for which most journals are at zero. If one wishes to use a very selective index, such an index should do a good job. But it would not able to assess a less concentrated distribution of talents, contrary to what could have been inferred from Table

13

. Conversely, Google Scholar indexes do allow us to consider most journals and, consistently, lead to weights that are not very convex, leading to a not very selective vision of the journal hierarchy. Other indexes appear as more ambiguous, as the Cnrs one. On the one hand it considers quite a lot of journals and puts equalitarian weights.

Table 14 :

 14 Convexity of Journal Indexes with zeros ranking in this Table is almost identical to the ranking of Table10. Indeed, only one non JCR journal (neither bold nor italic) makes its way to the top 60, the J. of the European Economic Association. As the J. of the European Economic Association is now part of the economics category of the JCR and is going to have AI and EF scores, the inclusion of the J. of the European Economic Association at the top only anticipates what will probably happen anyway. The other successful journal without AI and EF available is Econometric Reviews, at rank 90.Yet, this feature is no longer true when on scroll-down in the ranking. Among B journals many non JCR journals outrank JCR journals. In particular, Econometrics Journal, Review of Finance, European Journal of Political Economy, J. of Public Economic Theory, Review of International Economics, Theoretical Economics, and J. of Empirical Finance are all between rank 103 and 120 well above economics JCR journals like.

	Index	convexity	Std. dev.	intercept	Std. dev.	obs.	R 2
	H-index GS tot. -10 years	-1.59 a	(0.049)	10.61 a	(0.301)		0.47
	H-index GS tot. -5 years	-1.75 a	(0.057)	11.50 a	(0.348)		0.44
	GS cit. per art. -10 years	-1.76 a	(0.032)	9.34 a	(0.198)		0.71
	GS tot. cit. -5 years	-2.01 a	(0.027)	10.64 a	(0.169)		0.82
	GS cit. per art. -5 years	-2.07 a	(0.047)	12.07 a	(0.287)		0.62
	GS tot. cit. -5 years	-2.09 a	(0.032)	11.30 a	(0.194)		0.78
	Cnrs	-2.70 a	(0.074)	13.02 a	(0.416)		0.52
	Red Jasper total	-2.90 a	(0.040)	12.19 a	(0.216)		0.82
	Red Jasper per article	-3.09 a	(0.051)	13.40 a	(0.277)		0.76
	H-index Scopus	-3.09 a	(0.083)	16.66 a	(0.491)		0.53
	H-index Repec	-3.11 a	(0.071)	15.66 a	(0.409)		0.62
	Eigenfactor total	-3.16 a	(0.062)	14.02 a	(0.343)		0.68
	Eigenfactor per article	-3.29 a	(0.073)	14.87 a	(0.402)		0.63
	Kodrzycki and Yu	-3.56 a	(0.060)	14.09 a	(0.305)		0.74
	Ritzberger	-3.62 a	(0.072)	13.95 a	(0.356)		0.68
	Palacio-Huerta and Volij	-4.73 a	(0.098)	12.29 a	(0.347)		0.66
	and that the

Table 20 :

 20 Correlations Between CL Citation indexes and others

		CLh	JII PII	EF	AI	RZ PHV KY	RE	SC CN GS5t GS5p HGS5 GS10t GS10p HGS10
	CLm	1 0.64 0.64 0.64 0.64 0.56	0.29 0.56 0.66 0.72 0.67	0.85	0.82	0.65	0.84	0.80	0.59
	CLh	1 0.64 0.64 0.64 0.64 0.56	0.29 0.56 0.66 0.72 0.67	0.85	0.82	0.65	0.84	0.80	0.59
	10.2 Biases in the JCR database

Table 21 :

 21 Survey journals and their CL class

	Journal Rank Score econ brookings p. on eco. activity 1 A 0.25 j. of economic literature 2 A 0.23 j. of economic perspectives 3 A 0.24 economic policy 4 B 0.23 imf staff papers 5 B 0.22 j. of economic surveys 6 B 0.21 oxford r. of economic policy 7 B 0.22 world bank economic review 8 B 0.23 world bank research observer 9 B 0.23 brookings wharton p. on urban affairs 10 C 0.19 capitalism and society 11 C 0.18 cato journal 12 C 0.11 challenge 13 C 0.1 competition policy inter. 14 C 0.11 development 15 C 0.02 econ journal watch 16 C 0.11 economic notes 17 C 0.09 economists voice 18 C 0.16 f.r.b. of chicago eco. perspectives 19 C 0.12 f.r.b. of minneapolis quarterly review 20 C 0.2 f.r.b. of richmond eco. quarterly 21 C 0.09	Journal Rank Score econ f.r.b. of st. louis review C 0.1 finance and development C 0.1 foreign affairs C 0.04 found. and trends in microeco. C 0.22 inter. j. of central banking C 0.14 monetary and economic studies C 0.11 national institute eco. review C 0.09 perspektiven der wirtschaftspolitik C 0.12 research review C 0.29 r. of env. eco. and policy C 0.2 world trade review C 0.09 american economist D 0.1 brook. wharton p. on fin. services D 0.1 f.r.b. of atlanta eco. review D 0.09 f.r.b. of new york eco. policy review D 0.08 found. and trends in accounting D 0.06 found. and trends in ec.trics D 0.23 found. and trends in entrepreneurship D 0.12 found. and trends in finance D 0.15 survey of current business D .

Table 22 :

 22 Comparison between CL-index and the individual rankings

	rev obs quarterly j. of economics 1 AAA CL	AAA AA A B C D

Table 23 :

 23 Journal of the General subeld(top 120) Journals in bold are in the economics category of JCR. Survey journals are in small caps. Other JCR journals are in italic. .2 Development/Growth and System: 187 journals (18.07%) This class, the second largest in terms of number of journals, is subdivided into two classes, Development/Growth ( 131 journals (12.66%)) and Systems ( 56 journals (5.41%)).Journals in bold are in the economics category of JCR. Survey journals are in small caps. Other JCR journals are in italic.Journals marked with an * are no longer referenced in the EconLit database.

	Journal Rk Age Class Div. econ quarterly j. of economics 1 40 AAA 75.2 0.76 american economic review 2 40 AAA 70 0.73 j. of political economy 3 40 AAA 71.8 0.75 econometrica 4 40 AAA 14.7 0.8 review of economic studies 5 40 AAA 44.5 0.8 r. of economics and statistics 6 40 AA 71.1 0.69 economic journal 7 40 AA 68.5 0.7 j. of the european eco. association 8 6 AA 69.9 0.65 european economic review 9 36 AA 72.2 0.68 international economic review 10 40 AA 53.3 0.77 j. of economic perspectives 11 22 A 11.8 0.24 economics letters 12 21 A 44.1 0.67 scandinavian j. of economics 13 33 A 59.9 0.72 j. of economic literature 14 40 A 52.3 0.23 oxford economic papers 15 40 A 58.8 0.67 economica 16 35 A 59.2 0.7 canadian j. of economics 17 39 A 58.9 0.69 economic inquiry 18 35 A 68.5 0.69 economy and society 19 15 A 27.2 0.78 oxford bull. of eco. and statistics 20 36 A 23.9 0.65 southern economic journal 21 40 A 64.6 0.65 applied economics 22 40 A 85.5 0.59 european j. of political economy 23 16 B 41 0.48 kyklos 24 40 B 49.7 0.59 j. of the jap. and inter. economies 25 22 B 60.2 0.67 j. of eco. (zeitschrift. . . ) 26 23 B 37 0.65 j. of policy analysis and manag. 27 28 B 27.3 0.29 j. of institutional and theo. eco. 28 23 B 33.5 0.69 scottish j. of political economy 29 40 B 60.6 0.6 empirical economics 30 33 B 41 0.43 economic record 31 40 B 55.1 0.59 contemporary economic policy 32 15 B 81.6 0.63 japanese economic review 33 14 B 57.6 0.72 cesifo economic studies 34 6 B 53.7 0.34 manchester school 35 11 B 57.9 0.61 j. of economic education 36 40 B 1.2 0.7 j. of the royal statistical society: series a 37 21 B 21.1 0.13 oxford r. of economic policy 38 24 B 65.3 0.22 annales d economie et de statistique 39 23 B 59 0.4 applied economics letters 40 15 B 82 0.56 b.e. j. of eco. ana. and policy: front./adv. 41 4 B 41.1 0.59 german economic review 42 17 B 57.4 0.38 japan and the world economy 43 16 B 63.5 0.66 b.e. j. of eco. ana. and policy: contributions 44 4 B 53.8 0.54 eastern economic journal 45 25 B 50.2 0.4 annals of eco. and nance 46 9 B 48.7 0.44 j. of economic surveys 47 22 B 54.8 0.21 research in economics 48 12 B 36.4 0.39 bulletin of economic research 49 39 B 50.2 0.47 social science quarterly 50 40 B 28.6 0.13 economics bulletin 51 8 B 58.2 0.3 metroeconomica 52 25 C 27.9 0.36 spanish economic review 53 10 C 50.8 0.34 australian economic papers 54 40 C 60.7 0.39 b.e. j. of eco. ana. and policy: topics 55 4 C 60.4 0.42 empirica 56 33 C 39.4 0.32 economists voice 57 5 C 28.1 0.16 jahrbucher fur nationaloko. und stat. 58 40 C 59.3 0.65 australian economic review 59 39 C 55.9 0.27 schmollers jahrbuch 60 9 C 21.7 0.31	Journal Rk Age Class Div. econ portuguese economic journal 61 5 C 41.9 0.35 atlantic economic journal 62 31 C 77.5 0.3 de economist 63 40 C 49.5 0.31 j. of bioeconomics 64 10 C 18 0.32 business and politics 65 9 C 35.5 0.21 economic and social review 66 38 C 66.9 0.25 research review 67 11 C . 0.29 revue economique 68 40 C 82 0.17 f.r.b. of chicago eco. perspectives 69 17 C 44.9 0.12 eib papers 70 13 C 34 0.28 moneda y credito 71 17 C 46.1 0.27 applied economics quarterly 72 5 C 51.4 0.25 business economics 73 33 C 36 0.16 competition and change 74 6 C 36.8 0.21 oecd journal: economic studies 75 25 C 31.8 0.26 louvain economic review 76 8 C 58.7 0.29 j. of eco. interaction and coordination 77 3 C 24.2 0.32 capitalism and society 78 3 C 11.4 0.18 policy sciences 79 25 C 28.4 0.12 new zealand economic papers 80 23 C 38 0.33 perspektiven der wirtschaftspolitik 81 9 C 30.3 0.12 singapore economic review 82 26 C 59.4 0.25 agenda 83 13 C 61.8 0.2 independent review 84 13 C 26.6 0.23 swiss j. of eco. and statistics 85 40 C 60.6 0.23 public policy research 86 4 C 47.3 0.19 nnish economic papers 87 20 C 48 0.38 revue d economie politique 88 35 C 73.9 0.14 policy studies journal 89 3 C 22.8 0.06 found. and trends in microeco. 90 4 C 25.2 0.22 econ journal watch 91 5 C 14.7 0.11 environment and planning c 92 14 C 28 0.12 rivista di politica economica 93 21 C 71.2 0.13 challenge 94 28 C 53.4 0.1 inter. r. of eco. education 95 6 C 2.1 0.37 ekonomia 96 12 C 37.1 0.35 economic issues 97 13 C 52.4 0.32 inter. j. of social economics 98 26 C 51.2 0.15 economic outlook 99 4 C 21.5 0.25 j. of quanti. eco., new series 100 6 C 44.4 0.34 revue francaise d economie 101 11 C 62.6 0.18 giornale degli economisti e annali di eco. 102 33 C 47.2 0.16 global business and eco. review 103 10 C 70.3 0.18 faith and economics 104 4 C 5.9 0.32 ekonomiska samfundets tidskrift 105 40 D 42.3 0.79 papeles de economia espanola 106 11 D 45.3 0.11 f.r.b. of san francisco eco. review 107 33 D 33.7 0.21 academia economic papers 108 17 D 74.7 0.25 investigaciones economicas 109 23 D 67.2 0.23 revue de l ofce 110 12 D 50.1 0.09 hitotsubashi j. of economics 111 40 D 68.8 0.7 policy studies 112 13 D 43.9 0.09 economie et prevision 113 13 D 72 0.18 zeitschrift fur wirtschaftspolitik 114 13 D 42.2 0.21 inter. r. of economics 115 2 D 73.2 0.18 j. of private enterprise 116 15 D 10.8 0.17 r. of business and economics 117 1 D 51.7 0.15 politica economica 118 24 D 34.5 0.16 nationalokonomisk tidsskrift 119 40 D 52.8 0.18 j. of socio economics 120 18 D 34.8 0.27

Journals marked with an * are no longer referenced in the EconLit database. C

Table 25 :

 25 Journal of the Systems subeld(top 60) Journals in bold are in the economics category of JCR. Survey journals are in small caps. Other JCR journals are in italic.Journals marked with an * are no longer referenced in the EconLit database.Journals in bold are in the economics category of JCR. Survey journals are in small caps. Other JCR journals are in italic.Journals marked with an * are no longer referenced in the EconLit database.

	Journal Rk Age Class Div. econ j. of comparative economics 1 32 A 22.5 0.65 china economic review 2 20 B 25.1 0.63 economics of transition 3 16 B 20.9 0.64 eurasian geography and eco. 4 7 B 13.5 0.79 new political economy 5 13 B 14.4 0.61 comparative economic studies 6 24 B 21.2 0.34 post soviet aairs 7 17 B 7.1 0.8 j. of economic policy reform 8 2 B 52.7 0.36 eastern european economics 9 40 C 19.3 0.64 china quarterly 10 8 C 22.5 0.11 economic systems 11 18 C 19.5 0.33 j. of chinese eco. and business studies 12 6 C 22.4 0.33 eco. change and restructuring 13 4 C 18.3 0.3 politicka ekonomie 14 11 C 41.5 0.69 emerging markets nance and trade 15 7 C 37.6 0.16 post communist economies 16 10 C 14.5 0.61 china and world economy 17 5 C 25 0.13 european j. of comparative eco. 18 5 D 7.5 0.17 r. of middle east eco. and nance 19 1 D 4.6 0.2 prague economic papers 20 17 D 29.6 0.3 ekonomski pregled 21 6 D 31.6 0.03 zbornik ekonomskog fakulteta u zagrebu 22 6 D 22.9 0.01 global economic review 23 12 D 40.1 0.1 economic alternatives 24 3 D 35.7 0 nance a uver/czech j. of eco. and nance 25 6 D 25.9 0.21 problems of eco. transition 26 16 D 11.6 0.02 croatian economic survey 27 5 D 19.6 0.02 ekonomska istrazivanja/eco. research 28 11 D 33.9 0.02	Journal Rk Age Class Div. econ social sciences 7 D 10.6 0.03 china: an inter. journal 6 D 26.8 0.06 transition studies review 4 D 14.6 0.05 transformations in business and eco. 7 D 29.6 0.02 south eastern europe j. of eco. 6 D 21.9 0.16 panoeconomicus 3 D 37.9 0.12 acta oeconomica 40 D 19.5 0.11 privredna kretanja i ekonomska politika 5 D 26.9 0.05 chinese economy 12 D 17.6 0.05 china review 8 D 31.4 0.07 quarterly hungarian eco. review 6 D 34.6 0.05 ekonomicky casopis/j. of eco. 5 D 58 0.81 economic studies 9 D 32.9 0.05 economic thought 9 D 22.7 0.03 j. of european economy 7 D 27.5 0.03 j. of chinese economic studies 6 D 22.2 0.14 nancial theory and practice 6 D 18.1 0.06 frontiers of eco. in china 3 D 24.1 0.08 zagreb inter. r. of eco. and business 11 D 42.6 0.11 economic and business review 10 D 24.3 0.09 inter. j. of eco. policy in emerging economies 2 D 22.3 0.07 south east european j. of eco. and business 3 D 24.9 0.06 j. of eco. cooperation among islamic countries 16 D 6.1 0.05 islamic economic studies 16 D 0.7 0.07 proceedings of rijeka school of eco. 12 D 33.4 0.02 east west j. of eco. and business 8 D 23.8 0.16 j. of east west business 14 D 14.9 0.05 jingji yanjiu/eco. research journal 2 D 31.9 0.05

Table 27 :

 27 Journals of the Business/Marketing eld and Accounting eld

	Business/Marketing
	Journal Rk Age Class Div. econ j. of business* 1 37 A 29.2 0.36 marketing science 2 25 B 2.9 0.15 quanti. marketing and eco. 3 6 B 7.1 0.26 j. of consumer research 4 35 B 2.6 0.06 j. of marketing research* 5 10 B . 0.06 inter. j. of production eco. 6 15 C 8 0.04 inter. j. of manpower 7 17 C 13.4 0.16 or spectrum 8 7 C 12.1 0.06 review of marketing science 9 6 C 5.6 0.16 j. of manag. and governance 10 12 C 18.5 0.14 j. of world business 11 12 C 15.3 0.06 zeitschrift fur betriebswirtschaft 12 25 D 25.9 0.07 manag. 13 13 D 18.1 0.02 j. of inter. entrepreneurship 14 6 D 10.1 0.05 journal fur betriebswirtschaft 15 4 D 15.6 0.12 annals: eco. science series: timisoara 16 2 D 22.5 0 poslovna izvrsnost/business excellence 17 2 D 10.5 0.01 asia pacic business review 18 14 D 25.8 0.07 economia y administracion 19 4 D 10.5 0.02 j. of app. business research 20 13 D 23.9 0.07 estudios gerenciales 21 6 D 43.4 0.01 amteatru economic 22 3 problems and perspectives in manag. 23 6 ekonomie a manag. 25 4 pensamiento y gestion 26 3 j. of small business and entrepreneurship 27 6 zeitschrift fur wirtschafts und unternehmensthik 29 3 j. of business and public aairs 31 2 j. of african business 33 9 j. of transnational manag. 34 5 global j. of business research 35 2 information systems and e business manag. 36 5 D 15.3 0.04 D 28.3 0.03 D 23.1 0.04 D 28.8 0.04 liiketaloudellinen aikakauskirja 32 40 D 17.7 0.09 D 30.6 0.07 iium j. of eco. and manag. 30 12 D 5.6 0.04 D 9.2 0.05 canadian j. of administrative sciences 28 14 D 42.1 0.07 D 11.7 0.04 D 14.6 0.02 D 36.4 0.06 human resource dev. quarterly 24 14 D 5.3 0.02 D 26.6 0.06 D 20.6 0.01	Accounting Journal Rk Age Class Div. econ j. of accounting and economics 1 30 A 5.8 0.47 j. of accounting research 2 38 B 4.4 0.16 review of accounting studies 3 13 B 6.3 0.21 accounting review 4 40 B 4.8 0.12 contemporary accounting research 5 6 B 4.7 0.13 j. of accounting, auditing and nance 6 13 C 5.8 0.16 j. of manag. accounting research 7 13 C 3.7 0.12 found. and trends in accounting

Table 31 :

 31 Journals in Agricultural, Environmental, and Energy Agricultural Journal Rk Age Class Div. econ american j. of agri. eco. 1 40 A 16.8 0.69 agricultural economics 2 13 B 14 0.64 food policy 3 13 B 16.9 0.69 european r. of agri. eco. 4 26 B 11.9 0.67 j. of agricultural economics 5 23 B 12.3 0.69 j. of agri. and resource eco. 6 17 B 10.5 0.64 r. of agricultural economics 7 17 B 13.1 0.39 agri. and resource eco. review 8 13 C 15.9 0.38 j. of agri. and food industrial orga. 9 6 C 15.4 0.39 australian j. of agri. and resource eco. 10 12 C 17.2 0.24 choices 11 4 C 16.1 0.35 j. of agri. and applied eco. 12 16 C 12 0.33 agribusiness 13 12 C 14.3 0.3 canadian j. of agri. eco. 14 40 C 10.2 0.25 agricultural nance review 15 18 C 7.5 0.31 agriculture and human values 16 11 C 12.6 0.09 quarterly j. of inter. agriculture 17 7 C 19.1 0.26 j. of inter. agri. trade and dev. 18 4 C 12.3 0.39 eco. agraria y recursos naturales 19 8 D 15.9 0.23 cahiers d economie et sociologie rurales 20 14 D 20.2 0.18 agbioforum 21 11 D 9.5 0.21 ejade: electronic j. of agri. and dev. eco. 22 5

		Environmental
	D 20.9 0.36 D 19.8 0.02 economie rurale 24 10 D 14.1 0.08 cuadernos de desarrollo rural 23 2 agricultural and food science 25 4 D 3.8 0.04 rivista di economia agraria 26 5 D 14.5 0.06 agricultural economics review 27 9 D 14.7 0.15 indian j. of agricultural eco. 28 7 D 15 0.06 agronomia mesoamericana 29 14 D 7.1 0.01 eco. e diritto agroalimentare 30 4 D 10.3 0.07 new medit 31 7 D 15.6 0.03 qa: rivista dell associazione rossi doria 32 3 D 30.7 0.11 inter. j. of agri. resources, gov. and ecology 33 9 D 15.7 0.15	Journal Rk Age Class Div. econ j. of env. eco. and manag. 1 31 A 10.4 0.74 ecological economics 2 16 A 11.5 0.7 land economics 3 40 A 11.5 0.7 env. and resource economics 4 18 A 11.9 0.69 water resources research* 5 32 A 4.7 0.24 resource and energy economics 6 16 A 13.1 0.74 environment and dev. economics 7 13 B 21.3 0.45 climate policy 8 5 C 4.4 0.19 marine resource economics 9 25 C 4.9 0.34 r. of env. eco. and policy 2 C 5.7 0.2 natural resource modeling 21 C 7.7 0.28 j. of forest economics 8 C 6.3 0.29 inter. r. of envi.al and resource eco. 2 C 12.2 0.5 envi.al eco. and policy studies 11 C 9.7 0.26 resources policy 17 C 3.2 0.18 j. of envi.al planning and manag. 15 C 10.1 0.1 global environmental politics 8 C 9.8 0.08 j. of environment and dev. 10 C 16.3 0.11 natural resources journal 39 D 9.8 0.12 inter. j. of sustainable dev. 5 D 6.9 0.15 aquaculture eco. and manag. 12 D 8.4 0.11 orga. and environment 10 D 15.2 0.04 inter. j. of envi. and sustainable dev. 4 D 8 0.06 inter. j. of innovation and sustainable dev. 4 D 2.7 0.06 inter. j. of green economics 3 D 7 0.1 inter. j. of ecological eco. and statistics 4 D 14.1 0.15 Energy
		Journal Rk Age Class Div. econ energy journal 28 A 6.7 0.74 energy economics 29 B 5.9 0.67 eurochoices 8 C 7.7 0.32 energy studies review 17 D 4.8 0.2 j. of energy literature 14 D

In terms of EconLit years. A journal which enters EconLit today may exists for many years. Symmetrically if a journal exits the database, it does not (necessarily) means that the journal is no longer published.

Thomson-Reuters proposes, in fact, several databases through their Web of Sciences. For instance, for economics, information for individual articles can be found in the Social Science Index (for each referenced article it gives the list (eventually empty) of other referenced articles which cite it). Information summarized at the journal level can be found in the JCR database.

If a researcher is citing her/his own work it is understandable to discount somehow these self-citations. However when an Econometrica article cites another Econometrica article the choice is less obvious.

j. of economic perspectives 14 15.5 r. of economics and statistics 15

16.25 j. of econometrics 16 17.75 rand j. of economics 17 19.5 economic journal 18 20 international economic review 19 22.75 j. of business and eco. statistics 20 23.75 j. of labor economics 21 24 international orga. 22 26

These choices are to some extent subjective. In particular, 22 journals are excluded from the KY-economics category while they are in the JCR economics category. Examples are Industrial and Corporate Change, J. of Common Market Studies, J. of Economic Geography, J. of Law, Economics, and Organization, J. of Risk and Insurance, . . . Similarly it is dicult to agree upon the choice of many journals which are included while not being in the JCR economics category.

A journal has index h if h of its N papers have at least h citations each and the other (N -h) papers have no more than h citations each.

j. of inter. money and nance 18.86 0.46 health economics 18.16 0.67 world economy 18.09 0.58 small business economics 18.02 0.56 public choice 17.74 0.66 review of economic dynamics 17.67 0.77 economics letters 17.5 0.67 j. of comparative economics 17.45 0.65 j. of applied econometrics 17.38 0.7 scandinavian j. of economics 17.34 0.72 econometric theory 17.25 0.75 oxford bull. of eco. and statistics 16.97 0.65 j. of economic history 16.9 0.73 oxford economic papers 16.69 0.67 j. of population economics 16.41 0.66 j. of risk and insurance 16.12 0.77 env. and resource economics 15.88 0.69 Journals in bold are in the economics category of JCR. Other JCR journals are in italic. Journals marked with an * are no

0.73 j. of health economics 21 28.75 0.68 j. of urban economics 22 30 0.71 j. of env. eco. and manag. 23 33 0.74 review of nancial studies 24 33.75 0.37 j. of development economics 25 34 0.67 j. of the american statistical asso. 26 35.75 0.2 j. of money, credit, and banking

35.75 0.64 american j. of agri. eco.

37 0.69 j. of human resources

38.75 0.67 j. of law and economics

39.25 0.69 Journal Rank Score econ world development 39.5 0.62 j. of accounting and economics 41 0.47 ecological economics 41 0.7 j. of applied econometrics 42 0.7 american political science review 46.5 0.2 j. of eco. behavior and orga. 46.75 0.68 j. of industrial economics 47.25 0.71 j. of eco. dyna. and control 48 0.71 review of economic dynamics 48.25 0.77 health economics 48.5 0.67 j. of risk and uncertainty 49 0.72 j. of economic history 49.5 0.73 land economics 51.25 0.7 j. of economic growth 53.25 0.74 j. of law, eco., and orga. 53.25 0.68 economic theory 54.5 0.79 economics letters 54.75 0.67 j. of mathematical economics 55.25 0.81 scandinavian j. of economics 57 0.72 inter. j. of industrial orga. 57 0.71 j. of eco. and manag. strategy 57.5 0.74 econometric theory 58 0.75 j. of n. and quanti. analysis 59.5 0.49 oxford economic papers 61.5 0.67 national tax journal 61.75 0.72 economic inquiry 63.5 0.69 canadian j. of economics 64 0.69 j. of business* 64.25 0.36 public choice 64.5 0.66 economica 66 0.7 Journals in bold are in the economics category of JCR. Other JCR journals are in italic. Journals marked with an * are no longer referenced in the EconLit database. Survey journals are excluded.

Note that CNRS did not put any weights actually to its ranking but only distinguished ve classes. But then people get used to give weights 1 to 5 to these classes, and therefore 0 for all other ones, the convention we have adopted here.

Note that in Tables 15 to 19 journals with an asterisk are journals no longer referenced in the EconLit database. For example, J. of Business stopped being published in 2006 and therefore is no longer referenced in EconLit. Most of the asterisk journals are still published though. The results for these journals are more subject to caution as we had to use older (and sometimes on a shorter time frame) EconLit information for the JEL code normalized and authors' indexes.

B Comparing various indexes C Journals by subelds

Each one of the 1048 currently referenced journals can be characterized by the distribution of the JEL codes of the articles it publishes.

To classify journals according to these JEL codes one cannot simply put a journal in the class corresponding to its largest code share. Yet, when performing a classication procedure (with SAS) using the 130 2-digit JEL codes categories, it is almost what happens. Most journals are gathered into classes according to their top level 2 (or level 1) JEL code. Except a class that contains generalist journals, not in the sense of the JEL code )A1-General Economics), but publishing articles in various JEL codes, which can see as a good property. That is, EconLit journals can be usefully described as either specialist or generalist. To have a better grasp of this concept, we constructed for each journal j the following diversity index (the inverse of a Hirschman-Herndahl-Index):

, where c jk is the share of code k in journal j and c .k the average share of code k over all journals.

With the help of the procedure classication proposed by SAS, we cluster EconLit journals in the following 10 wide elds, divided in sub-elds. Importantly, this is only a matter of presentation (and not a new analysis), which, allows, still, to identify the best journals in each eld in a common approach and may be therefore very useful for some evaluations.

C.1 General: 204 journals (19.71%)

This class regroups journals with a large diversity index, the median of the diversity index being 19.

Among generalist journals, 90% of them have an index above 21. The third quartile is at 58.7 while in the total population only 5% of the journals have an index above 59.6. A general journal has, on average, a diversity index of 43.8 more than twice 19.4 the average for a journal outside the general class. Among the most diverse journals one can nd the Quarterly J. of Economics (75.18), the J. of Political Economy (71.77), the American Economic Review (70.02), the Review of Economics and Statistics (71.10), and the J. of the European Economic Association (69.88) as well as less famous journals as the Atlantic Economic Journal (77.54). The Review of Economic Studies is also in this class with a diversity index of 44.46 (about the average value for this group of journals). We decided to put Econometrica in this class even if its diversity index is lower than the average, at 14.74, which would reect the profession opinion.

In terms of age, these generalist journals are slightly older (two years) than the average EconLit journal.

Finally, they are also more patronized by the CL-2002 economists. C.8 Space: 63 journals (6.09%)

This eld is further divided into three subelds: Urban/Regional ( 35 journals (3.38%)), Transport ( 16 journals (1.55%)), and Housing ( 12 journals (1.16%)).

Table 33: Journals in Urban/Regional Urban/Regional Journal Rk Age Class Div. econ j. of urban economics 1 32 A 19.1 0.71 regional science and urban eco. 2 33 A 18.2 0.63 j. of economic geography 3 8 A 19.6 0.5 economic geography 4 40 B 32.5 0.58 j. of regional science 5 40 B 16.8 0.34 urban studies 6 38 B 14 0.16 regional studies 7 33 B 18.6 0.17 economic development quarterly 8 10 B 12.1 0.57 environment and planning a 9 22 B 31.8 0.12 inter. regional science review 10 30 B 11.8 0.25 growth and change 11 39 C 27.8 0.23 annals of regional science 12 25 C 14.5 0.24 papers in regional science 13 14 C 14 0.2 inter. j. of urban and regional research 14 13 C 17 0.07 review of regional studies 15 38 C 7.2 0.24 urban aairs review 16 4 C 15.6 0.06 j. of geographical systems 17 10 C 12.2 0.09 brookings wharton p. on urban affairs 18 9 C 14.1 0.19 j. of regional analysis and policy 19 13 D 15.6 0.2 r. of regional research (jahrbuch. . . ) 20 11 D 15.3 0.2 r. of urban and regional dev. studies 21 13 D 20.3 0.17 local economy 22 9 D 9.9 0.06 investigaciones regionales 23 7 D 12 0.1 canadian j. of regional science 24 17 D 13.2 0.09 j. of real estate practice and education 25 11 D 8.4 0.17 australasian j. of regional studies 26 14 D 12 0.13 rivista eco.a del mezzogiorno 27 4 D 16.8 0.01 community development journal 28 9 D 15.8 0.03 inter. j. of innovation and regional dev. 29 1 D 9.5 0.02 revue d economie regionale et urbaine 30 13 D 17.9 0.05 revista de estudios regionales 31 4 D 14.4 0.06 urban public eco. review 32 5 D 6.4 0.07 scienze regionali/italian j. of regional science 33 7 D 3.4 0.06 r. portuguesa de estudos regionais 34 6 D 21.5 0.04 studies in regional science 35

D CL2009 without the econ correction

Tables 36 to 37 list the top 240 journals when the econ correction is not applied. Many journals with low econ percentage are moving up. The J. of Finance is second instead of tenth (see Table 15). Similarly, J. of the American Statistical Asso. moves up from rank 56 to rank 10 and American Political Science Review from 60th to 12th. On the other hand, the ranks of the economics category JCR journals do not change much and the ranking with or without the econ correction are globally consistent, which can be viewed as another robustness check of our methodology. In particular, the Spearman correlation coecient between both ranking is 0.93.