Last updated on February 13, 2021
A question from a graduate student:
Based on our conversation about my interests, what are the most important ones (5? perhaps more?) that I should be paying attention to?
If there is some blog post you could point me to about the taxonomy of the field, I would be appreciative. I have heard the term “top 5 journals” thrown around a lot but I couldn’t tell you which ones they were, moreover I’m not sure if general top 5 econ = top 5 development.
My answer, edited for clarity and grammar:
Good question! Traditionally the top five journals in economics are: the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Review of Economic Studies.
I say “traditionally,” because there are now seven or eight “top-five” journals. Taking the five I mentioned, you can add the Review of Economics and Statistics, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and the Economic Journal, and maybe even the new the American Economic Review: Insights and the Journal of the European Economic Association.
In development economics, the top journals are the Journal of Development Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, World Development, the World Bank Economic Review, and the Journal of Development Studies.
In agricultural economics, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics is top (historically, if not by impact factor) along with Food Policy, Agricultural Economics, Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, and maybe the European Review of Agricultural Economics.
It’s hard to subscribe to just five table-of-contents emails, to be honest. Five is what you’d get in a field, but most development folks are interested in one other field (agricultural economics in my case), and then you have to know what’s published in top general journals because they often publish things that are germane to your research interests.
I should also have added: Among the general sciences journals, which often publish stuff of relevance to agricultural, development, and environmental economists, the top three are Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science.
Over the years, I’ve found that the best way to keep up (short of having a departmental librarian who emails you the tables of contents you are interested in every time those journals release a new issue, as is the case in our department), is via RSS feed. Most journals have an RSS feed that you can subscribe to with a reader. I used to use Google Reader, but Google did away with it, and so now I use feedly, which is free (and is also how I keep up with blogs).