Which academic journals are at the forefront in publishing research that bears high policy significance for central banks and international financial institutions?
Publications feature prominently in the recruitment and evaluation process of central bank research staff. Objective measurement also relies on journal rankings that are often derived from a journal’s overall citation impact factor.
While general academic impact is certainly also highly relevant, central bank staff should also be evaluated based on the policy impact of their work, which is harder to measure objectively.
To contribute towards better measurement, Raphael Auer, Giulio Cornelli, and Christian Zimmermann have recently computed a ranking that counts citations made in central bank publications, such as their working paper series and policy papers. The study is based on the universe of publications and citations covered in REPEC. The goal is to gauge which academic journals are at the forefront in publishing research that bears high policy significance for central banks and international financial institutions.
The paper and the full ranking can be accessed here:
https://ideas.repec.org/p/bis/biswps/1139.html
Some findings are:
1. Whereas this ranking confirms the policy relevance of the five major general interest journals in the field of economics, the three major finance journals fare comparatively less favourably.
2. Journals specializing in monetary economics, international economics and financial intermediation feature highly, but surprisingly not those specializing in econometrics.
3. The ranking is topped by the Brookings Institution’s Papers on Economic Activity, followed by the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Literature, the International Journal of Central Banking, and the Review of Economic Studies.