A New Approach – Developing Economics

by José Alejandro Coronado and Roberto Veneziani

There is growing concern about the increasing emphasis on journal rankings in academia. This is of special consequence in economics: given theoretical and methodological cleavages, heterodox outlets tend to be marginalised in traditional ranking systems.

Despite this, journal rankings are used and may indeed be useful. In a recent paper, we explored how to build a ranking that appropriately reflects the reputation of heterodox economics journals amongst heterodox economists (Coronado and Veneziani, 2025).

We are not the first ones to build rankings for heterodox economics journals. Fred Lee and others (e.g., Lee et al., 2010; Cronin, 2020) developed heterodox economics journal rankings based on subjective peer evaluations combined with bibliometric indicators. These composite “quality” indices had the objective of measuring research quality in the heterodox economics community.

In contrast, we measure reputation and intellectual influence within the heterodox economics community by focusing exclusively on bibliometric indicators. Thus, we capture the views of the heterodox economics community through their citation choices.

To build our ranking we require, first, a tool to rank journals based on bibliometric data. We adopt the Palacios-Huerta and Volij (2004) (PV) index — a theoretically-founded measure of intellectual influence within citation networks. Unlike simple citation counts or impact factors, the PV index accounts for both the quantity and the prestige of citations received, capturing the recursive structure of intellectual influence.

From a Broad Set of Journals to the Core

Second, we need to identify the set of journals to rank. This is easier said than done, lacking a clear, widely shared notion of heterodox or even heterodox-adjacent outlets. We begin by focusing on a comprehensive list of journals: we start from the set of outlets used in the influential study by Lee et al. (2010) and add a range of additional journals identified in more recent contributions (e.g., Gräbner et al., 2018; Kapeller and Springholz, 2016). After excluding outlets with missing citation data, our database covers 119 journals and over half a million citations between 2000 and 2023.

While we do derive a ranking of this large set of journals based on the PV index (Table 1 in the paper), a closer look at the structure of the citation network raises some doubts on all rankings that focus on broad, comprehensive definitions of heterodox economics. For, the network structure is extremely sparse: journals form internally cohesive groups, but these groups barely cite each other. Indeed, the network effectively splits into two almost disconnected subnetworks. It is unclear that these journals bear a sufficiently close family resemblance to rank them together.

To overcome this problem, we follow an inductive approach: we use community detection techniques to let the citation data reveal which journals are actively part of the heterodox intellectual conversation, and we identify a tightly connected group of 14 journals, which we term the Heterodox Economics Core.

The Restricted Ranking: Results and Interpretation

The first table below (Table 3 in the paper) presents the ranking of the Heterodox Economics Core, using the PV index based on citations from the past five years.

Several things are worth noting: The Review of Keynesian Economics, founded only in 2012, ranks first, indicating its remarkable rise in influence within the heterodox community. Established journals such as the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Metroeconomica and the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics remain highly ranked. Journals like the Review of Radical Political Economics and Journal of Economic Issues rank lower than might be expected based on informal reputations.

Perhaps surprisingly, some outlets often associated with heterodox economics — such as Feminist Economics and Review of Social Economy — do not belong to the Heterodox Economics Core. Our community detection analysis shows that they belong to a separate cluster — which we call Social Economics and Inequality — with relatively weak citation links to the Heterodox Economics Core. Nevertheless, given their relevance in the community, we build an extended ranking that includes these outlets, and the other journals in their cluster, in addition to the core 14 journals.

The expanded ranking is shown in the table below (Table A1 in the paper) and it is immediately evident that the addition of these journals does not make a major difference.

Beyond the static ranking, Figure 2 in the paper traces the evolution of journal influence (for journals in the Heterodox Economics Core) from 2008 to 2023. It shows that significant shifts have occurred: RoKE has steadily gained ground, while the influence of Cambridge Journal of Economics, Metroeconomica, Review of Political Economy, and Journal of Post Keynesian Economics has somewhat declined over time.

These results are quite striking. Due to the strong network externalities in citation communities, one would expect that over time established journals cement their position as central nodes in the network, reinforcing their influence through cumulative advantage. Yet, the data reveal a more dynamic landscape within heterodox economics, where newer journals can rise rapidly, and established outlets can lose ground — suggesting that intellectual leadership in the field remains actively contested rather than ossified.

References

Coronado, J.A. and Veneziani, R. (2025). “Heterodox Economics Journals: A Network Analysis,” Metroeconomica.

Cronin, B. (2020). “Journal Rankings and Heterodox Economics.” Journal of Economic Issues.

Gräbner, C., et al. (2018). “Towards a Pluralist Ranking of Heterodox Economics Journals.” Review of Political Economy.

Kapeller, J. and Springholz, F. (2016). Directory of Heterodox Economics Journals (6th ed.).

Lee, F.S., et al. (2010). “Research Quality Rankings of Heterodox Economic Journals.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology.

Palacios-Huerta, I. and Volij, O. (2004). “The Measurement of Intellectual Influence.” Econometrica.

José Alejandro Coronado is Lecturer in Economics at the University of Greenwich.

Roberto Veneziani is Professor of Economics at Queen Mary University of London.