What happened to the top 5 economic publications in 40 years?

What happened to the top 5 economic publications in 40 years?

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What happened to the top 5 economic publications in 40 years?

"American Economic Review" and "Journal of Political Economy" are the two most important journals. Articles published by the former tend to have detailed tests and research designs, but the latter have more important conceptual articles. JPE is more refreshing and enjoyable to read. The "Quarterly Journal of Economics" has wonderful articles and is now much more influential than before. Although "Econometrica" ​​is still ranked third or fourth, it is not as important as before, perhaps because the influence of pure theory has declined.

For the same reason, although both "Rand Magazine" and "Economic Research Review" are very good journals, they have lost their previous brilliance. The "Journal of Economic Theory" was very important in the 1970s, but it has fallen off the cliff.

In each sub-region, there are also top journals. "Journal of Economic Outlook" and "Journal of Economics Literature" are both interesting and helpful to read, but they are rarely a place for new ideas. They mainly report how to interpret and digest new ideas.

Scientific journals, especially "Nature Journals", are becoming more and more important to economics. My favorite field journal is "Journal of Law and Economics". The "Journal of Finance" is of high quality, but finance itself is a world. In the past fifteen years, the relative earnings of the top-ranked journals have increased significantly; more schools have asked to publish these journals as a tenure standard.

The following article is very inspiring for young scholars. It tells us through data that the world's top 5 journals: AER, JPE, QJE, ECA, RES have received, published and cited facts about papers in 40 years.

What happened to the top 5 economic publications in 40 years?

We have obtained data on the number of papers received, published and cited in the top five journals in the field of economics from 1970 to 2012 through three channels.

First, we use Ecolit to obtain the titles, authors, page numbers and JEL codes of articles published in five major journals since 1970.

Second, we use data from Ellison (2012) and the annual report published by the editor of the journal, as well as our communication with the editor of the journal to obtain the annual number of manuscript submissions for the five major journals.

Third, we use "Google scholar citations" to get the citations of all the articles published in the top 5 journals. This is done through an automated web crawler program.

Based on the data obtained from the above three channels, we have obtained the following 9 key article reception, publication and citation trends.

  1. From 1990 to 2012, with the exception of JPE, the number of manuscripts received by the other four major publications doubled each year. Specifically, it has grown from 2,800 in 1990 to 5,800 in 2012. For the time being, let’s not mention the complicated techniques used in economics articles. This also puts more workload on the editors and reviewers of the five major journals.

What happened to the top 5 economic publications in 40 years?

Figure 1: The number of manuscripts received by the five major publications each year

  1. The number of articles that can be published in the five major journals each year has dropped from 400 in the 1970s to about 300 in 2010-2012. The acceptance rate has dropped from 15% to 6%. For young scholars, their careers will be potentially affected by this fact. Specifically, AER: decreased from 13.8% to 8.1%, ECA: decreased from 27.1% to 8.5%, JPE: decreased from 13.3% to 4.8%, QJE: decreased from 10.9% to 3.5%, RES: decreased from 16.9% To 5.5%. QJE is now the top 5 most difficult publications.

What happened to the top 5 economic publications in 40 years?

Figure 2: The number of papers published in the five major journals each year

  1. "AER" now accounts for 40% of the articles published in the top 5 journals, up from 25% in the 1970s. Mainly because AER has expanded from 100 articles per year to 125 articles per year. In contrast, JPE and ECA have reduced the number of publications from 85 and 100 per year to 30 and 60 per year. This directly leads to JPE's current publication volume of only less than 1/4 of AER.

What happened to the top 5 economic publications in 40 years?

Figure 3: The number of articles published in the five major journals/the average number of manuscripts received in the past two years

  1. The length of papers published in the five major journals in recent years is three times the length of those published in the 1970s, which has caused a relative shortage of journal pages. Specifically, the page number of papers in the five major journals has increased by 300% from 16 pages in the 1970s to 45.5 pages in 2011-2012.

What happened to the top 5 economic publications in 40 years?
Figure 4: The length of articles and the number of authors published in the five major journals

  1. The number of authors per paper increased from 1.3 in 1970 to 2.3 in 2012, partially offsetting the decline in the number of articles published each year. Specifically, in the 1970s, three-quarters of the papers were unique, but in the 1990s, the proportion of unique papers dropped to 1/2. At this time, the average number of authors per paper was 1.6, but by 2012, about 3/4 of the papers The paper has more than 2 authors, and the average number of authors per paper at this time is 2.2. Comment: If there are many co-authors, the probability of appearing in the top 5 publications will increase.

Refer to Figure 4

  1. The citation rate of these 5 major publications is still very high. Among the papers published in the late 1990s, the median number of citations by Google scholars was 200. Now, if the citation rate of the five major publications is excluded from the time factor (of course, the number of citations may not be too much for a short publication time), it is also comparable to the previous citations.

What happened to the top 5 economic publications in 40 years?

Figure 5: Median citations of articles published in the top 5 journals (higher means better reputation)

What happened to the top 5 economic publications in 40 years?

Figure 6: The number of citations/number of articles published in the top 5 journals (higher means high-precision)

What happened to the top 5 economic publications in 40 years?

Figure 7: Cumulative distribution function of citations of articles published by five major publications (the more the entire distribution curve surrounds other curves, the publication is the winner)

  1. Journal citation rankings are still relatively stable. "QJE" is a special case. She has climbed from fourth to first in the past thirty years. AER and JPE cited 100 articles in the 1980s, which rose rapidly to 250-300 in the 1990s, but dropped to 130 in 2005. QJE has now become the journal with the highest citation rate. In contrast, the citation rate of ECA's pure theoretical economics is now at the bottom, so the current trend is that journals are introducing some empirical articles.

Refer to Figures 5, 6 and 7

  1. Those longer papers and papers with more collaborators have significantly higher citations. We did a simple regression, taking the number of paper citations as the dependent variable, and then taking the length of the paper, the number of collaborators, academic field, and year as explanatory variables, thus reaching the above conclusion. The main reason is the increasing competition in the layout of articles, which has caused authors to increase the quality by expanding the space.

What happened to the top 5 economic publications in 40 years?

  1. There has been a relatively new change in the citation trend. The number of citations of papers related to "development and international" has risen, but the number of citations of papers related to econometrics and theory has declined. (Note: The figure below is based on the amount of publication)

What happened to the top 5 economic publications in 40 years?

Figure 8: Economics field of articles published in 5 major journals (according to JEL code)

Thanks to the econometrics circle public account for providing a platform, "read the original text" at the end of the article can be directly connected to the author's original text.

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What happened to the top 5 economic publications in 40 years?

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