Abstract
This study ranks—for the first time—12 international academic journals that have economic history as their main topic. The ranking is based on data collected for the year 2007. Journals are ranked using standard citation analysis where we adjust for age, size and self-citation of journals. We also compare the leading economic history journals with the leading journals in economics in order to measure the influence on economics of economic history, and vice versa. With a few exceptions, our results confirm the general idea about what economic history journals are the most influential for economic history, and that, although economic history is quite independent from economics as a whole, knowledge exchange between the two fields is indeed going on.
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Notes
The European Review of Economic History and the Australian Economic History Review will both appear in the JCR in the future.
Such adjustment step also corrects the bias due to authors who artificially produce citations to show that their research is akin to the topics of the journal which they intend to publish on.
Kalaitzidakis et al. (2003) use the same time window. The ISI uses a 2-year window, which we find is a bit short for the field of economic history.
Some researchers have sought to control for number of pages or characters published. Here, we follow the standard practice of adjusting for number of articles, which is motived by the fact that an article is the basic unit of citation.
Impact measures provided by Thomson Scientific in the Journal Citation Report rely on a procedure largely similar to the one described above, except for the exclusion of self-citations and the time span.
A journal’s impact factor is not representative of its articles, because the citation rate of individual articles in the journal is not narrowly distributed around the mean value. This issue was previously pointed out by Seglen (1997).
The IQR equals R3 i −R1 i , where R3 i and R1 i are the values of the upper and lower quartile, respectively, of the citation rates distribution. More precisely, we consider any observation falling outside the interval given by \(\left[ R1_{i}-1.5\cdot \hbox{IQR}, R3_{i}+1.5\cdot \hbox{IQR}\right] \) to be an outlier. We first calculate the n interquantile ranges for each journal’s distribution, and then remove the outliers according to the different ranges.
The threshold is set to 0.000001. The procedure reached convergence after 22 iterations.
Journals appearing in both JCR and ECONLIT are EHR, EEH, and JEH. The remaining journals appear only in ECONLIT. The latter database also mentions (i) African Economic History, Archives of Economic History and Journal of European Economic History, none of which was available electronically or in hard copies for 2007; (ii) Business and Economic History which was left out because it publishes only conference papers.
CLIO published its first volume in 2007.
This is calculated using the formula \(\sum\nolimits_{j = 1}^n {(C_{ij,t} + C_{ji,t} )}{/} \sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^n {C_{ij,t} } \) .
These values make clear that regionally oriented journals do not dominate the set of citations, as it could be argued. Actually, almost 50% of citations is related to JEH and EEH, which are general topic journals.
Figures do not sum to one since they relate to the specific journal, not to the whole set of citations.
As for the case of ANN, this may be explained by a language bias.
This might be due to the language bias for which we do not adjust.
The difference can be explained by the fact that the existing analyses largely rely on the JCR, which ranks EHR as a top-end journal.
A few articles are over-cited with respect to the sample average citation rate, and this generates a rightward skewness in the data. For instance, the most cited article is by Prados de la Escosura (2000), which receives nine citations, followed by three articles—Abramovitz (1986) and Williamson (1995; 2002)—each of which are cited seven times. However, the robustness analysis of step I(6) shows that impact factors are only marginally affected by multiple citations, while the journal positions remains intact after the robustness check.
Due to tied ranks, the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient cannot be calculated directly.
This choice is due in part to the fact the top-four economic history journals are included in the Social Science Citations Index. This enables the collection of citations from the electronic database of the JCR to be used in the between-discipline analysis.
Had we selected the top-four economic journals from the ranking conducted by Kalaitzidakis et al. (2003), the results would have been largely identical to those presented below.
The ranking is obtained making use of citations from economic journals.
The ranking is built on citations from economic history journals.
We believe that a common practice among economic historians that publish books is to simultaneously publish the main results of the book in an economic history journal. If this is indeed a common practice, then that means that we will implicitly pick up the role of economic history journal publication on books, because, presumably, the reference to research that inspired the author’s work in the book are repeated in the article, which is based on the book.
References
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The paper was presented at the second FRESH Meeting, the third Joint Summer School of the CEPR RTN ‘Unifying the European Experience’, the third Sound Economic History Workshop, as well as in research seminars at the University of Copenhagen, University of Lund, and LUISS ‘Guido Carli’ University in Rome. The authors would like to thank Pierpaolo Benigno, Bruce Campbell, Sean Connolly, Claude Diebolt, Mark Dincecco, Giuseppe Di Taranto, Giovanni Federico, Alexander Field, Pierre-Cyrille Hautcoeur, John Hey, Paolo Malanima, Joel Mokyr, Albrecht Ritschl, Paul Sharp, Jochen Streb, Nathan Sussman, Hans-Joachim Voth, Daniel Waldenström, Jeffrey Williamson, Joseph Zeira, as well as two anonymous referees, for comments, suggestions and help in providing data. We also thank Tatjana Pakar for her research assistance, and the Department of Economics at the University of Copenhagen for financial support.
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Di Vaio, G., Weisdorf, J.L. Ranking economic history journals: a citation-based impact-adjusted analysis. Cliometrica 4, 1–17 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-009-0039-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-009-0039-y