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

Assistance in data gathering was provided by Adrienne Strong.

Received January 2007; accepted August 2007.

References

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Therese C. Grijalva * and Clifford Nowell ([dagger])

* Department of Economics, Weber State University, Ogden, UT 84408-3807, USA; E-mail tgrijalva@weber.edu; corresponding author.

([dagger]) Department of Economics. Weber State University, Ogden, UT 84408-3807, USA: E-mail cnowell@weber.edu.

(1) Available at http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/ phdhum/phdhumindex_brief.php (July 2007).

(2) Departments offering doctorates in agricultural economics were not included in the analysis.

(3) Available at http://www.albany.edu/econ/eco_phds.html (July 2007).

(4) Available at http://www.petersons.com/graduate_home.asp?path=gr.home (July 2007).

(5) Coauthors listed as "et al." rather than by name in Econlit are not identified specifically by Econlit.

(6) Articles with four or more authors or in articles where coauthors are not specifically identified (i.e., et al.) are treated as having four authors.

(7) An alternative to using impact factors is to use total citations per journal per year. We chose to use impact factors to be consistent with past research (e.g., see Tschirhart 1989).

(8) In 1991, JEL modified its classification system. We followed the JEL recommendations in mapping pre-1991 subject codes to post-1991 subject codes (Journal of Economic Literature 1991).

(9) It should be noted that in the case of an HHI of 1.0, more than one faculty member may publish in this area, yet because other faculty members' publications may not be indexed in the SSCI, they are not recognized in our data as contributing to the department's research productivity.