A journal ranking based on central bank citations

(October 2023, revised September 2024)

Summary

Focus

Economic policy is informed by academic research. Over time, the realm of topics of interest to central banks has shifted in lockstep with real events and has significantly broadened. Nonetheless, certain outlets have consistently been a point of reference for the policy community. Which academic journals are at the forefront in publishing research that bears high policy significance for central banks and international financial institutions?

Contribution

We develop a unique ranking methodology centred on capturing policy relevance for central banks. Our ranking is based on simple impact factors. The main difference compared with existing rankings is that we do not include all citations, but only those in publications that are issued by a central bank, like its working paper series or policy journals. Our ranking facilitates a more granular understanding of policy impact within the field of central banking. Moreover, it offers a guide to researchers who want to target policy audiences and can help central banks more generally in gauging and optimising the policy impact of their analytical output and its evolution over time.

Findings

Our ranking approach reveals four significant insights. First, journals focusing on core areas of central banking, such as monetary economics, secure top positions in our ranking. Second, the top five general interest economic journals rank highly in the ranking. Third, top finance journals fare less favourably, while journals focused on financial intermediation are ranked high due to consistent improvement over time, especially following the Global Financial Crisis. Lastly, despite some improvement, econometrics-focused journals have limited prominence in our ranking.

Abstract

We present a ranking of journals geared towards measuring the policy relevance of research. We compute simple impact factors that count only citations made in central bank publications, such as their working paper series. Our baseline ranking focuses on the time period 2014–23 and examines all items published in the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) database. This ranking confirms the high policy relevance of journals specialising in macro, monetary and international economics. Also, the major general interest journals in the field of economics feature reasonably well in this ranking. In contrast, the major finance journals fare somewhat less favourably, with the notable exception of those focused on financial intermediation. Among the journals published by academic institutions, the ranking is topped by the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Monetary Economics, while the International Journal of Central Banking and the BIS Quarterly Review top the list of journals issued by policy institutions.

JEL classification: A11, E50, E58

Keywords : central banks, citations, academic journals, ranking