Ranking economic history journals: a citation-based impact-adjusted analysis - Cliometrica

1. The European Review of Economic History and the Australian Economic History Review will both appear in the JCR in the future.

2. Such adjustment step also corrects the bias due to authors who artificially produce citations to show that their research is akin to the topics of the journal which they intend to publish on.

3. Kalaitzidakis et al. (2003) use the same time window. The ISI uses a 2-year window, which we find is a bit short for the field of economic history.

4. Some researchers have sought to control for number of pages or characters published. Here, we follow the standard practice of adjusting for number of articles, which is motived by the fact that an article is the basic unit of citation.

5. Impact measures provided by Thomson Scientific in the Journal Citation Report rely on a procedure largely similar to the one described above, except for the exclusion of self-citations and the time span.

6. A journal’s impact factor is not representative of its articles, because the citation rate of individual articles in the journal is not narrowly distributed around the mean value. This issue was previously pointed out by Seglen (1997).

7. The IQR equals R3 _i −R1 _i , where R3 _i and R1 _i are the values of the upper and lower quartile, respectively, of the citation rates distribution. More precisely, we consider any observation falling outside the interval given by \(\left[ R1_{i}-1.5\cdot \hbox{IQR}, R3_{i}+1.5\cdot \hbox{IQR}\right] \) to be an outlier. We first calculate the n interquantile ranges for each journal’s distribution, and then remove the outliers according to the different ranges.

8. The threshold is set to 0.000001. The procedure reached convergence after 22 iterations.

9. Journals appearing in both JCR and ECONLIT are EHR, EEH, and JEH. The remaining journals appear only in ECONLIT. The latter database also mentions (i) African Economic History, Archives of Economic History and Journal of European Economic History, none of which was available electronically or in hard copies for 2007; (ii) Business and Economic History which was left out because it publishes only conference papers.

10. CLIO published its first volume in 2007.

11. This is calculated using the formula \(\sum\nolimits_{j = 1}^n {(C_{ij,t} + C_{ji,t} )}{/} \sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^n {C_{ij,t} } \) .

12. These values make clear that regionally oriented journals do not dominate the set of citations, as it could be argued. Actually, almost 50% of citations is related to JEH and EEH, which are general topic journals.

13. Figures do not sum to one since they relate to the specific journal, not to the whole set of citations.

14. As for the case of ANN, this may be explained by a language bias.

15. This might be due to the language bias for which we do not adjust.

16. The difference can be explained by the fact that the existing analyses largely rely on the JCR, which ranks EHR as a top-end journal.

17. A few articles are over-cited with respect to the sample average citation rate, and this generates a rightward skewness in the data. For instance, the most cited article is by Prados de la Escosura (2000), which receives nine citations, followed by three articles—Abramovitz (1986) and Williamson (1995; 2002)—each of which are cited seven times. However, the robustness analysis of step I(6) shows that impact factors are only marginally affected by multiple citations, while the journal positions remains intact after the robustness check.

18. Due to tied ranks, the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient cannot be calculated directly.

19. This choice is due in part to the fact the top-four economic history journals are included in the Social Science Citations Index. This enables the collection of citations from the electronic database of the JCR to be used in the between-discipline analysis.

20. Had we selected the top-four economic journals from the ranking conducted by Kalaitzidakis et al. (2003), the results would have been largely identical to those presented below.

21. The ranking is obtained making use of citations from economic journals.

22. The ranking is built on citations from economic history journals.

23. We believe that a common practice among economic historians that publish books is to simultaneously publish the main results of the book in an economic history journal. If this is indeed a common practice, then that means that we will implicitly pick up the role of economic history journal publication on books, because, presumably, the reference to research that inspired the author’s work in the book are repeated in the article, which is based on the book.

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Authors and Affiliations

1. Faculty of Economics, Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali-LUISS ‘Guido Carli’, Viale Romania 32, 00197, Rome, Italy

   Gianfranco Di Vaio

2. Department of Economics, Finance and Statistics, University of Perugia, Via A. Pascoli 20, 06123, Perugia, Italy

   Gianfranco Di Vaio

3. Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen, 6 Studiestræde, 1455, Copenhagen, Denmark

   Jacob Louis Weisdorf

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gianfranco Di Vaio.

Cite this article

Di Vaio, G., Weisdorf, J.L. Ranking economic history journals: a citation-based impact-adjusted analysis. Cliometrica 4, 1–17 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-009-0039-y

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• Received: 08 December 2008

• Accepted: 11 March 2009

• Published: 29 March 2009

• Issue Date: January 2010

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-009-0039-y

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