Ranking Economics Departments Using Teaching-Focused Research Productivity

Abstract

[Author Affiliation]Melody Lo, College of Business, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX 78249, USA; melody.lo@utsa.eduMC Sunny Wong, Department of Economics, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94117, USA; mwong11@usfca.eduFranklin G Mixon Jr, Department of Economics, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849, USA; fmixon@comcast.net; corresponding author[Acknowledgment]The authors thank two anonymous referees of this journal, John Pepper and Charles Sawyer for helpful comments. We thank Helen Au Yeung, Subhashish Sengupta, and Augustina Pesci Gonzalez for collecting the data used in this study. The usual caveat applies.1. IntroductionPrevious studies have accurately asserted that rankings of economists' research output and economics departments can be just as important to academic economists as the ESPN football poll is to college football coaches (Gibbons and Fish 1991; Mixon and Upadhyaya 2001). As a result of this importance, economists have produced a substantial amount of research on individual, department, and journal rankings over the past 30 years. Much of this literature stream has examined the productivity of traditional forms of economics research in order to rank economists and institutions.This study constructs new rankings of economics journals, economics departments, and economists that are based on (i) a tabulation of citations to economic education articles published in the economics literature since 1991 and (ii) a tabulation of the number of economic education articles (and pages) published since 1991.1 Given this methodology, our ranking emphasizes teaching-focused research. Thus, our construct offers an interesting alternative to economics journal, department, and faculty rankings that is based on the productivity of traditional types of economics research.2. Journal Ranking Methodology and ResultsTo construct our teaching-focused research ranking of economics journals, departments, and faculty we examined published articles that list one or more of the economic education classification codes from the Journal of Economic Literature (hereafter, JEL ): A200-A290. The JEL redefined its classification codes for indexing economics research in 1991, so our ranking construct includes all JEL -classified journal articles in economic education from 1991 through April 2005. Overall, there are 1535 articles within our time frame.Table 1 lists the top 20 economics journals with regard to the quantity of production of economic education research. Of course, some journals specialize in this area of economics research (e.g., Journal of Economic Education ; JEE ), while others publish only an occasional piece in the genre (e.g., Economic Inquiry ; EI ). Thus, the ranking in Table 1 reflects this element. At the top of the list, with 429 articles (since 1991), is the JEE . The American Economic Review (AER ) is ranked fifth (54 articles), while the Journal of Economic Perspectives (JEP ) is 13th (24 articles). A few well-known regional associations' general journals are also in the top 20. Among these are the Southern Economic Journal (SEJ ) in seventh place (34 articles) and EI in 16th place (16 articles).Table 1 Teaching-Focused Research Productivity Based on Numbers of Articles Published: Top 20 Economics Journals (Table omitted. See article image.)To account for the relative importance of economics journals in the field of economic education, we first tabulate the number of economic education articles that are contained in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) for each journal. A total of 831 of the 1535 articles published since 1991 that list the JEL codes for economic education are contained in the SSCI. Next, we identified the importance of journals in the field of economic education by examining total citations as well as total citations per article received by a journal's economic education articles published since 1991. …