General-interest versus specialty journals: Using intellectual influence of econometrics research to rank economics journals and articles

This paper demonstrates the potential problem in using existing economics journal rankings to evaluate the research productivity of scholars by constructing a new ranking of economics journals and articles. Based on 2142 econometrics sample articles published from 2000 to 2005, our ranking results show that the intellectual influence of an econometrics article published in several econometrics|statistics journals is much higher than if it were published in the most prestigious general-interest journal. Given that a study's potential influence is integrated into the submission decision, this suggests a substantial downward bias toward econometricians when existing rankings are used to evaluate their research productivity. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.