Aiming for the very top journals is what everybody does, but doing so may cost a lot of time and opportunities. On the other hand, you also don’t want to sell short your hard-working papers. A graduate student should consider submitting papers only to the journals listed in these rankings.
The Specialized Online Rankings
IDEAS/RePEc Aggregate Rankings for Journals
IDEAS/RePEc Simple Impact Factors for Journals
EconPhd
Google Scholar
CNRS (French)
The General Online Rankings
Web of Science
Scimagojr
Scopus
The Papers that do the Rankings
Ritzberger, K. (2008). A ranking of journals in economics and related fields. German Economic Review, 9(4), 402-430.
See the list of Recommended Journals on p. 143.
Barrett, C. B., Olia, A., & Bailey, D. V. (2000). Subdiscipline-specific journal rankings: whither Applied Economics?. Applied Economics, 32(2), 239-252.
See the top 10 journals for each subfield of Economics on p. 242.
Engemann, K. M., & Wall, H. J. (2009). A journal ranking for the ambitious economist. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, 91(3), 127-139.
See the “ambitious” list on p. 134
Combes, P. P., & Linnemer, L. (2010). Inferring missing citations: A quantitative multi-criteria ranking of all journals in economics.
One of the most comprehensive lists, with grand field and subfield lists.
Other rankings:
Lehmann, R., & Wohlrabe, K. (2017). An Elo ranking for economics journals’’. Economics Bulletin, 37(4), 2282-2291.
Hole, A. R. (2017). Ranking economics journals using data from a national research evaluation exercise. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 79(5), 621-636.
How to publish in top journals
How to Publish in Top Journals (Kwan Choi)
How to Publish in a Top Journal (Hammermesh)
An Excerpt from Choi (by Akio Matsumoto)
Know your enemies
Writing Tips for Ph. D. Students (Cochrane)
