A guide to graduate study in economics: ranking economics departments by fields of expertise

Southern Economic Journal, April, 2008 by Therese C. Grijalva, Clifford Nowell

To identify the universities offering doctoral degrees in economics, we used the website maintained by the University of Albany. (3) This site contained a list of all economics departments with Ph.D. programs at American and Canadian universities and was verified with Peterson's Guide to Graduate Schools. (4) Based on this, we identified 129 programs located in the United States that offered doctoral degrees in economics as of the spring of 2004.

The second step, identifying all tenure-track or tenured faculty for each university, was accomplished by accessing economics department Web sites. A slight shortcoming of this approach is that faculty lists are highly dependent on whether a department maintains and updates their faculty lists. Removing faculty members without any publications resulted in over 2600 faculty names. In the few cases where faculty appeared on multiple department websites, we included the faculty member in the department where he or she had a permanent and current affiliation. We recognize that there are some faculty who are members of a department other than economics (e.g., the Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at Northwestern University) yet contribute to the education of graduate students and are productive in the field of economics. Determining who these faculty are and the extent to which they are involved in the economics department made it impractical to include them in the analysis.

The third step focused on acquiring journal publications for each faculty member listed in the Journal of Economic Literature database Econlit. The database was queried for the publications of tenure-track faculty identified by the 129 departments. Faculty were dropped from the analysis if Econlit indicated that they had no published articles. This study focused on articles published between 1985 and 2004. Over this time period, Econlit cataloged over 38,000 publications of faculty who were employed in Ph.D. economics programs as of the spring of 2004. (5) Further, Econlit provided four essential pieces of information that would be needed for analysis: (i) article source, (ii) page numbers, (iii) number of authors, and (iv) Journal of Economic Literature subject codes. The article source would be needed in order to assess the quality of the article. The credit each author received for a publication was weighted by the number of authors and page length. The greater the number of coauthors, the less credit assigned to each coauthor, and the greater the length of the article, the greater the credit assigned to each coauthor. (6) The subject codes would be needed to sort articles by a field of expertise.

The final step was assigning a quality index, [Q.sub.j], to each journal. We used both the impact factors published in the 2004 Social Science Citation Index (SSCI scores) and rankings based on "citations per character in 1990" for articles published between 1985 and 1989 (JEL scores) proposed by Laband and Piette (1994). (7) Many publications contained at least one or both an SSCI and a JEL score. There were 107 journals containing both an SSCI and a JEL score. There were an additional 131 with only an SSCI score and an additional 16 with only a JEL score. Thus, the total number of journals indexed in the SSCI that we used in our analysis was 238, and the total number of journals indexed in the JEL that we used in our analysis was 123. Publications that had neither an SSCI nor a JEL score were dropped from the analysis. It should be noted that although the SSCI indexes 172 journals in the economics discipline, we use all publications identified by Econlit and indexed in the SSCI, even if outside the economics discipline, in calculating productivity.