On the Use and Abuse of Economics Journal Rankings

There are several aspects of journal-level citations that, taken together, provide considerably more information than mean citations per article. This information is likely to be more useful, in terms of helping someone form more accurate expectations of the quality of a given article published in a journal, than the information provided by mean citations per article only. I provide data that both illustrate this point and offer a range of information about the citations to papers published in 248 economics journals during the period 2001-5.