New Citation Analysis of Environmental and Ecological Economics

A new citation analysis of environmental and ecological economics has just been published in Ecological Economics. The authors are Andreas Hoepner, Benjamin Kant, Bert Scholtens, and Pei-Shan Yu. It follows up on our papers on influential articles in the field (Costanza et al., 2004; Ma and Stern, 2006) by analyzing articles from 2000-2009. The main characteristics of their research design are:

1. They only look at citations to articles published between 2000 and 2009 in a group of 14 environmental and resource economics journals including Ecological Economics.

2. The main indicator is citations per annum which gives recently published papers much more weight than in most traditional rankings.

3. They distribute citations to authors and institutions on a fractional basis - so each author of our 2004 paper would only get 20% of the citations.

The results are interesting but different to what you might expect. Costanza ends up being ranked 61st in the field as all the above features count against him. C. C. Lee ends up in the 1st position in the ranking. Papers and authors associated with ecosystem services and payments for them are highly ranked which does make sense.

We did not publish a ranking of authors as part of our 2004 and 2006 papers but we did calculate them. So here are the rankings based on number of citations between 1994 and 2003 in articles published in Ecological Economics:



The full pdf is here. A peculiarity of this ranking is that all citations are assigned to the first author due to the limitations of the Web of Science database at the time. Despite this, it seems fairly plausible to me.

For JEEM, we came up with the following ranking:



Full list here.