Apples to Oranges? Interdisciplinary and Economics Journal Rankings

Our friends over at the wonderful Environmental Economics Blog posted a piece about the challenges of ranking interdisciplinary journals alongside ‘economics’ journals:

Ranking Environmental and Natural Resource Journals

John Whitehead took some time to think through and empirically examine whether the SJR indicator – which is citation and network based and was developed “to be used in extremely large and heterogeneous journal citation networks. It is a size-independent indicator and its values order journals by their “average prestige per article” and can be used for journal comparisons in science evaluation processes.” (Wikipedia).

Check out his listing of Environmental and Resource Economics Journals from SJR, re-posted here:

then go to the SJR site to learn more about individual journals and compare your favorites.

Do you agree with these assessments? Will it affect where you send articles?

How do you use journal rankings, and how do others use journal rankings to assess you? The economics profession took another ding last week when this article argued with experiments that it can be ‘worse’ to have a ‘lower value’ publication on your CV than no publication at all… ‘signalling gone bad’ and a loss for science, if people really behave this way and respond to this as an incentive! (Aside: Article is in the Journal of Economic Psychology, SJR 1.11, h-index 71, RePec RIF ranking 190; Danish BFI 1, Economics).

In Denmark there is a 4 point ranking system called the Bibliometric Research Indicator (BFI) (that gets a little more complicated when used for evaluation because numbers of authors and international authors factor in to how many ‘points’ of credit you actually receive). These points can directly affect how funds filter to your department, and in some Danish Universities and Departments, to individual researchers.

Journals are ranked within a ‘discipline’ with a 1 (normal), 2 (superior), or 3 (newly added this year, for ‘super-superior’) or they are left off the list (0). Reasons for being left off the list range from ‘too new’ like JAERE or ‘not sufficiently academically focused’ – there’s no way to know why, exactly. You can argue to have a journal included, but it’s a slow process. (Aside: the new ‘super-superiors’ in economics are Econometrica, JPE, AER, QJE, Review of Economics Studies. Nature and Science are also “3’s.” Out of 20,773 journals ranked across 69 disciplinary categories, only 28 have the new ‘3 class’ – why 5 of these are economics journals – you tell me. Does the new categorization make an economics ‘2’ less than it used to be? The other fields with 3’s are Geo- and Climate Studies (Nature Geoscience is here); Molecular and Cell Biology / Biotechnology; Materials Technology/ Nanotechnology Science; Medicine; General (where Science and Nature are)).

When you re-order for these explicit incentives, you get something like the below. Note that the only “2’s” in economics that fit the description of environmental and natural resource journals might be Energy Economics and JEEM, but there are ‘2’ journals to be found through a number of different fields relevant for interdisciplinary economics – Journal of Environmental Management, Marine Policy, Energy Policy, Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Science, Fish and Fisheries, Forest Ecology and Management,  the Environment and Planning Journals, Global Environmental Change….