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Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics

How has publishing in top economics journals changed since 1970? Using a data set that combines information on all articles published in the top-5 journals from 1970 to 2012 with their Google Scholar citations, we identify nine key trends. First, annual submissions to the top-5 journals nearly doubled from 1990 to 2012. Second, the total number of articles published in these journals actually declined from 400 per year in the late 1970s to 300 per year most recently. As a result, the acceptance rate has fallen from 15% to 6%, with potential implications for the career progression of young scholars. Third, one journal, the American Economic Review, now accounts for 40% of top-5 publications, up from 25% in the 1970s. Fourth, recently published papers are on average 3 times longer than they were in the 1970s, contributing to the relative shortage of journal space. Fifth, the number of authors per paper has increased from 1.3 in 1970 to 2.3 in 2012, partly offsetting the fall in the number of articles per year. Sixth, citations for top-5 publications are high: among papers published in the late 1990s, the median number of Google Scholar citations is 200. Seventh, the ranking of journals by citations has remained relatively stable, with the notable exception of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which climbed from fourth place to first place over the past three decades. Eighth, citation counts are significantly higher for longer papers and those written by more co-authors. Ninth, although the fraction of articles from different fields published in the top-5 has remained relatively stable, there are important cohort trends in the citations received by papers from different fields, with rising citations to more recent papers in Development and International, and declining citations to recent papers in Econometrics and Theory.

Prepared for the Journal of Economic Literature, March 2013. Special thanks to Chris Bowdler, Glenn Ellison, Phil Reny, Lawrence Katz, Imran Rasul, and Jesse Shapiro for their help in obtaining submission data. We also thank Sydnee Caldwell, Kaushik Krishnan and Jeff Sorensen for outstanding research assistance as well as a team of undergraduate students (Robin Gong, Samuel Johnson, Ki Sung Kim, Sunny Lee, Seongjoo Min, Zi Peng, Eileen Tipoe, and Brian Wheaton). We thank the editor (Janet Currie), Glenn Ellison, Xavier Gabaix, Penny Goldberg, Dan Hamermesh, Lawrence Samuelson and seminar participants at Harvard University for useful comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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• Research Highlights

The tyranny of the top five

• Featured Chart
• July 6, 2020

pressmaster

A handful of academic journals loom large in the minds of ambitious, young economists.

A single publication in one of the big five— The American Economic Review , Econometrica , the Journal of Political Economy , the Quarterly Journal of Economics , and the Review of Economic Studies —is sometimes the difference between getting tenure and restarting a career elsewhere.

But a paper in the June issue of the Journal of Economic Literature questioned whether putting so much weight on publishing in the best journals is good for the economics profession as a whole.

Authors James Heckman and Sidharth Moktan found that even after controlling for the quality of publications, the top five journals play an outsized role in the careers of economists.

The authors analyzed data on tenure-track faculty at the thirty-five highest ranked economics departments in the US, according to US News and World Report , between 1996 and 2008.

Figure 5 from their paper shows how the number of top-five papers influences the chances that a young faculty member gets tenure in their first spell of employment.

Figure 5  from Heckman and Moktan (2020)

The chart shows the likelihood of getting tenure (blue columns) versus the number of top-five publications—separated into four bins based on the quality of an author's overall publications, as proxied by the citation performance of their portfolio of publications. Bin 1 (the upper-left quadrant) corresponds to the bottom 25 percent of author publication portfolios and Bin 4 (the lower-right quadrant) corresponds to the top 25 percent.

Across each quartile of publication quality, more top-five publications makes it more likely to receive tenure.

However, it is more valuable to have a mediocre research portfolio with top-five publications than an outstanding portfolio without any top-five publications. For instance, an author with less citations (Bin 1) but who has two papers published in the top five has a greater chance of tenure than a highly cited author (Bin 4) with no top-five papers.

The authors argued that such overreliance on major publications as an indicator of quality distorts the incentives of young professors. Untenured faculty may sacrifice a great idea if it can’t get published in a top-five. Or they may avoid large-scale, data-intensive empirical projects that don’t easily fit into the format of top-five journals.

Ultimately, the big five could be holding back the profession’s quality and creativity.

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