Uncertainty and the ranking of economics journals

Journal rankings often show significant changes compared to previous rankings. This gives rise to the question of how well estimated the rank of a journal is. In this contribution, we consider uncertainty in a ranking of economics journals. We use the invariant method of Pinski and Narin to rank the journals. We propose an uncertainty measure, which is based on a bootstrap approach. The measure is the average absolute change in rank, which we see as a reasonable uncertainty measure regarding rankings. We further calculate, based on the bootstrap method, 95% confidence interval for the observed values of the invariant method. We show that ranks of the highest, as well as the lowest, ranked journals are well estimated, while there is a high degree of uncertainty regarding the rank of many mid-ranked journals. The distribution of the underlying measure is useful for identifying groups of journals that are more or less of the same quality (from the point of view of the invariant measure). The journal with the highest observed value of the invariant measure, Journal of Political Economy, has the best performance and constitutes a singleton, whereas Quarterly Journal of Economics and Econometrica form the next group (there is a slight overlap between the two with respect to confidence intervals). The journals ranked between about 190–230 form another group in which there are no major quality differences between the journals, as the confidence intervals are overlapping.