The ARC (Australian Research Council) has finally released the ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia) ranked journal list that will be used in this year's research assessment exercise. As I've commented that the assessment of economics will not count citations and so the ranking of journals is all that counts in measuring research outputs. All journals are ranked as A*, A, B, and C. A* is best. There are some anomalies - journals ranked surprisingly low and some journals ranked surprisingly highly. For energy and environmental economists, key issues are that Environment and Development Economics and Review of Environmental Economics and Policy are both ranked at only B. Among interdisciplinary journals, Energy Policy, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (who publish Ecological Economics Reviews), Journal of Environmental Management, and Ambio are only ranked B. It's not surprising that Journal of Environment and Development is ranked B as it isn't in the ISI database.
Most of my articles have been published in A journals with four A* publications in Nature, Journal of Geophysical Research, and Trends in Parasitology and B publications in JED, EDE, Energy Policy, Policy Studies Journal, Applied Economics Letters, Professional Geographer (this is another anomaly), and Geoforum.
And I just noticed that Journal of Economic Issues doesn't even appear to be on the ERA list! If you are looking for The Energy Journal, it is classified under Resources Engineering and Extractive Metallurgy. This is despite it being published by the International Association for Energy Economics.
This is already influencing our decision about where to send the paper that I presented here in Adelaide.
P.S.
I've found the Journal of Economic Issues. It's listed as JEI and ranked C. So I have published one paper in a C ranked journal. As it is an ISI journal I would think B is more appropriate.
There's a much bigger issue for environmental economists .... There is no A* outlet in the field. JEEM got demoted to A, Despite JEEM being A* in every draft list. Despite the ESA recommending JEEM for A*. Despite ESA reps in the process never even having heard that JEEM might get demoted. If you work in almost any other major field of economics, publish in the top field journal and get rewarded with an A*. Not in environmental economics.
ReplyDeleteYes, that is true. But JEEM was just A on Australian Business Deans Council list that Andrew Leigh linked to.
ReplyDeleteThere was a revised list from the ABDC which gave JEEM an A* ranking. I cannot provide a link, but the search string "ABDC revised economics" will yield a Pdf document with this ranking. To my knwoledge this was the most recent ranking exercise that they undertook. The ERA excercise also did a preliminary ranking which had JEEM at A*, but as the previous post suggests, this is now downgraded to an A. I have actually emailed the ARC to see if this is a typo, it is just that strange a result to me.
ReplyDeleteI cannot believe that the Journal of Economic Issues is a C journal. While much of the debate is about the relativities of A* and A journals, there are real problems at the other end as well. I believe the C rankings are crazy. It ranges from good journal down to a local mag!!
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