Productive efficiency analysis of quantitative economics journals through stochastic frontier analysis using panel data

The main goal of a scientific journal is to diffuse new knowledge. The number of citations received by a journal can be considered as a measure of this objective and, in turn, as a measure of productivity in relation to the production process in which the journals are involved. In order to assess this production process, in this paper econometric models using data panel are employed to obtain measures of efficiency for those journals belonging simultaneously to the areas of “economics” and “social science, mathematical methods” in the Web of Science database. This efficiency is measured in terms of the distance between the actual production of the journals and their estimated maximum achievable number of citations based on their available resources.