The literature ranking academic programs in the social sciences dates to Fusfeld's (1956) study of Allied Social Science Associations meeting programs, leading to Cleary & Edwards's (1960) study of American Economic Review articles, and Yotopoulos's (1961) study which included publications in the AER, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
The second generation of ranking articles were similarly limited to the top three economics journals. Siegfried (1972) and Moore (1973) ranked doctoral programs in economics by faculty publications. Hogan (1973) ranked economics Ph.D. programs by their graduates’ publictions for 1960–1969. Smith & Gold (1976) and Niemi (1975) ranked Southern economics departments, reflecting a recent emphasis on research then being adopted by leading institutions in the region. Ladd & Lipsett (1979) presented reputational surveys, but the majority of the economics ranking literature has always favored objective and reproduceable approaches.
The third generation of ranking studies typically relied on broader samples of approximately 24–40 publications. These included Graves, Marchand, & Thompson (1982), Medoff (1989), Berger & Scott (1990), Conroy, Dusansky, & Kildegard (1995), Miller (1996), Scott & Mitias (1996), Dusansky & Vernon (1998), and Feinberg, Grilliches, & Einav (1998). Graves, Marchand, & Thompson (1982) also presented regression analyses to identify determinants of program performance. Many of these papers attempted to address limitations of earlier studies. Laband & Piette's (1994) journal rankings were used in some of these studies to motivate a more comprehensive selection of top and field journals. Tschirhart (1989) and Tremblay et al (1990) ranked economics departments by subfield. Medoff (1989) and Palacios-Huerta & Volij (2004) ranked individual scholars rather than departments. A number of alternative rankings of European and international programs were presented in the inaugural issue of the Journal of the European Economic Association: Combes & Linnemer (2003), Coupe (2003), Kalaitzidakis et al (2003), and Lubrano et al (2003). Ellison (2002) proposed a model to explain how journal articles evolved over time.
Durden & Marlin (1990) studied 1973–1987 publications in Public Choice and the Journal of Law & Economics. Miller, Tien, & Peebler (1996) ranked political science departments. Sobel & Turner (2004) constructed rankings based on thirty years of publications in Public Choice, finding that leading authors changed frequently, as would be expected in a rapidly-progressing field, but that George Mason University consistently provided the largest share of contributions. Congleton, Marsella, & Cardazzi (2022) studied articles in Constitutional Political Economy.
The Journal of Law & Economics and Constitutional Political Economy are quarterly journals, though the JLE often publishes extra supplementary issues. Public Choice is essentially a quarterly journal, but during the 2011–2020 decade it published two volumes annually, each consisting of two combined issues, numbers 1–2 and 3–4. Every issue in this period was a double issue. Including articles, book reviews, and books reviewed in the three journals, the 120-plus issues over the decade account for 1,777 scholarly artifacts contributed by 2,182 authors with 3,076 distinct instances of authorship or co-authorship. Each journal’s impact factor has enjoyed an upward trend as shown in Table 1.
Table 1
Journal Impact Factors1 and Alternative Impact Metrics2014–2021
Year | Journal of Law & Economics | Public Choice | Constitutional Political Economy |
2014 | 1.32 | 1.09 | 0.73 |
2015 | 1.56 | 1.21 | 0.66 |
2016 | 1.08 | 0.97 | 0.68 |
2017 | 1.12 | 1.16 | 0.37 |
2018 | 1.14 | 0.88 | 0.61 |
2019 | 0.98 | 0.87 | 0.64 |
2020 | 1.81 | 1.52 | 0.63 |
2021 | 1.56 | 1.91 | 0.83 |
SJR2 | 1.589 | 0.844 | 0.275 |
h-index3 | 86 | 86 | 29 |
Notes: 1Impact factors are based on citations in Scopus-indexed journals. 2SJR = SCImago Journal Rank is a weighted impact factor weighting citations by the importance of the journals where cited. 3The h-index is the greatest h such that h articles published in the journal have been cited at least h times. |
Table 1 impact factors are the average number of times articles or other artifacts published during the preceding two calendar years were cited in the current year, for example, the 2021 impact factor is the ratio of the number of 2021 cites of articles published in 2019 and 2020, divided by the total number of articles published.
In computing the rankings in Tables 2 through 5, b ooks reviewed were treated as equivalent to an article. Unweighted rankings attribute one equal point to each appearance of an author or coauthor. Individual rankings presented in Table 2 strictly ignore any part of a scholar's output not published or reviewed in the three journals. Books reviewed may be double counted if they were reviewed in more than one journal. The larger an institution’s departments of political science, economics, related social sciences, law school, etc., the stronger represented its political economy scholars are likely to be, and the weaker any potential bias from ignoring unreviewed books or articles in other journals.