Ranking the ‘Diamond Core’ economic journals: A note

By estimating the production frontier with the application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) we rank the ‘Diamond Core’ economic journals as has been presented by Diamond (1989). By using one composite input and one composite output the paper ranks 27 core economics journals. For the first time a study attempts to rank the 27 journals by using data from SCOPUS database for the time period of 1996-2010. In addition for the first time three different quality ranking reports are incorporated in the DEA modelling problem in order to classify the journals into four categories (‘A’ to ‘D’). The results reveal that from the 27 ‘core’ economics journals the five journals with the highest rankings are Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Economic Literature, Review of Economic Studies and American Economic Review. In addition it appears that the journals’ impact factor derived from SSCI database reflects their ranking position.