Taking the Temperature: A Meta-Ranking of Economics Journals

Abstract

We construct a meta–ranking of 315 economics journals based on 38 different individual rankings. Our ranking incorporates both bibliometric measures from three different databases (Web of Knowledge, RePEc and Google Scholar) and previous rankings in the literature. Furthermore, we account for the different scaling of all bibliometric measures by standardizing each ranking score. Finally, we aggregate all rankings using a double–weighting algorithm which corrects for incomplete lists. In our meta–ranking the top five journals are given by: Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Econometrica, American Economic Review and Journal of Economic Literature.

Keywords: meta-ranking, economics journals, aggregation, citations, RePEc, Google Scholar, Web of Knowledge

JEL Classification: A12, A14