The Editors and Authors of Economics Journals: a Case of Institutional Oligopoly?

Abstract

This paper examines data on the institutional backgrounds of editors and authors of the top 30 economics journals, identified by their 1995 citation impact. It is revealed, for example, that 70.8% of the journal editors were located in the United States, and twelve U.S. universities accounted for the location of more than 38.9%. Concerning journal article authors, 65.7% were located in U.S. institutions and twelve U.S. universities accounted for 21.8%. Arguably, the degree of institutional and geographical concentration of editors and authors may be unhealthy for innovative research in economics.

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“…This discussion has concentrated on the top-ranked American economics faculties, perhaps appropriately given the concentration of articles in leading journals written by US-based scholars (Hodgson and Rothman 1999), a dominance that citation analysis shows is not diminishing (Drèze and Estevan 2007). Given the increasing flows of economists to and mostly from Europe (and to a much lesser extent, to and mostly from Asia and Australia), however, one might wonder where the top-ranked schools in other English-speaking countries would fit into the rankings presented in .…”

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