It is well-known that the distribution of citations to articles in a journal is skewed. We ask whether journal rankings based on the impact factor are robust with respect to this fact. We exclude the most cited paper, the top 5 and 10 cited papers for 100 economics journals and recalculate the...

As pointed out in Amin e Mabe (2000, p. 1), the journal impact factor (IF) “has moved in recent years from an obscure bibliometric indicator to become the chief quantitative measure of the quality of a journal, its research papers, the researchers who wrote those papers, and even the...