Ranking Journals Following a Matching Model Approach. An Application to Public Economics Journals

Journal rankings based on citation indexes are widely used in the economics field for global top journals. We propose an alternative way to rank journals based on the publishing behavior of top ranked authors. We justify this approach by depicting the scientific publishing market as following a matching process. Compared to the citation approach, the methodology that we propose has comparative advantages in terms of time effort to produce national and subdiscipline rankings, and it makes it possible to compare them with global rankings. It also corrects the impact underestimation that the citation approach tends to produce in new and re-founded journals. We propose an empirical application to the case of public economics journals.