Inferring Missing Citations: A Quantitative Multi-Criteria Ranking of all Journals in Economics

Abstract

This paper presents a novel ranking of economics journals. Our methodology is the following. First, we construct an index to rank the 304 journals recorded in the Thomson Reuters (JCR) database, for which citation counts exist. This index combines (sophisticated) citation indexes, field of specialization normalized indexes, and a h-index based on Google Scholar citations. Moreover this index puts forward journals in economics. Second, we extend this index to the 898 EconLit non JCR journals. We estimate a model in which the index is explained by the score of the journal's authors and its Google Scholar citations. Finally we use the estimated model to predict the value of the index for the non JCR journals. Therefore we obtain a consistent ranking index of all EconLit journals.