Differences in Citation Patterns Across Journal Tiers in Economics

We analyze citations patterns of more than 6,000 economics research articles published in top five, second tier, and top field journals. In line with previous literature, we find that although top five journals' articles generally receive more citations and the life cycles of those citations are longer, their influence (in term of citations) is overestimated: a (non-)successful top five article receives only 3.5 (4) times as many cites as an equivalently (non-)successful second tier of top field article. Our contribution is to show that this ratio is strongly associated with the field of economics research, e.g. this ratio is lowest for econometric methods papers, and with the success of articles (as measured by citation counts), e.g. in all fields of economics research, except for theory, this ratio decreases sharply as we move toward more successful articles