Environmental Economics

I recently considered the problem of how to rank multidisciplinary journals along with economics journals. I used the SJR. From Wikipedia:

SCImago Journal Rank (SJR indicator) is a measure of scientific influence of scholarly journals that accounts for both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance or prestige of the journals where such citations come from. A journal's SJR is a numeric value indicating the average number of weighted citations received during a selected year per document published in that journal during the previous three years. Higher SJR values are meant to indicate greater journal prestige.

The SJR indicator is a variant of the eigenvector centrality measure used in network theory. Such measures establish the importance of a node in a network based on the principle that connections to high-scoring nodes contribute more to the score of the node. The SJR indicator has been 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. The SJR indicator is a free journal metric inspired by, and using an algorithm similar to, PageRank.

The SJR indicator provides an alternative to the impact factor (IF) or average citations per document in a 2-year period, abbreviated as "Cites per Doc. (2y)". …

The SJR indicator computation is carried out using an iterative algorithm that distributes prestige values among the journals until a steady-state solution is reached. The SJR algorithm begins by setting an identical amount of prestige to each journal, then using an iterative procedure, this prestige is redistributed in a process where journals transfer their achieved prestige to each other through citations. The process ends up when the difference between journal prestige values in consecutive iterations do not reach a minimum threshold value any more. The process is developed in two phases, (a) the computation of Prestige SJR (PSJR) for each journal: a size-dependent measure that reflects the whole journal prestige, and (b) the normalization of this measure to achieve a size-independent measure of prestige, the SJR indicator.

I downloaded the 2016 SJR data for 23,000+ journals in all disciplines and regressed the impact factor, SJR and h-index on the number of papers published in the past 3 years and whether 'economics' or 'economics and econometrics' was listed in the category column (with controls for journals published in Germany, the Netherlands, UK and US).

For the impact factor (IF), if 'economics' or 'economics and econometrics' was listed as a journal category then the IF is 0.42 (s.e. = 0.08) lower. For a US journal: IF = 1.49 – 0.42 x [economics or economics & econometrics=1]. That is a fairly large discount (if my econometrics and math is correct). 

For the h-index, if 'economics' was listed first, second or third then the H-index is 14 (s.e. = 2.39) lower. For a US journal; H-index = 43 – 14 x [economics=1].

For the SJR, if 'economics and econometrics' was listed first then the SJR is 0.61 (s.e. = 0.8) higher. For a US journal: SJR = 0.90 + 0.61 x [economics & econometrics=1]. That is a fairly large premium. If 'economics and econometrics' was listed second then the SJR is 0.38 (s.e. = 0.9) higher, another large premium.

The story that I am familiar with is that economics journals have lower simple impact factors relative to other disciplines. This story seems to be consistent with the IF and h-index results. This does not seem to be the case with SJR suggesting that the SJR is comparable for economics and non-economics journals.

There are 674 journals with 'economics' or 'economics and econometrics' listed as a category. There are very few journals below the median that are not obscure so SJR ranks about 337 economics journals.

The top 10 economics journals according to SJR are Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of the European Economic Association.

Here is the SJR ranking of environmental and resource economics journals with a comparison to RePEc's Recursive Impact Factor (RIF) rank in the far right hand column:

Journal of Forest Economics is not ranked because it does not have 'econonomics' as a category. JAERE and JEEP and not in the SJR data. According to the RePEc RIF, JAERE is now #6 behind JEEM, REEP, REE, Land and ERE. 

MRE is an interesting case. Its SJR puts it in the top 25% of all economics journals but its RIF places it last among environmental and resource economics journals. 

Back to the original purpose of this exercise, if you go to the SJR website and type in the name of your interdisciplinary journal you can get a fairly decent comparison (if my data management [note: in the process of this blog post I noticed I missed some agricultural economics journals] and analysis is correct). For example, Water Resources Research and Journal of Environmental Management have SJRs of 2.38 and 1.14. That places them fairly high on the list. That said, anecdotal evidence suggests that it is relatively more difficult to publish in the economics list above.