Differences in citation patterns across journal tiers: The case of economics

We study how citation patterns differ between journal tiers in economics. Concretely, we analyze citations patterns of more than 6,000 economics research articles published in top five, second tier, and top field economics journals between 1992 and 1996. In line with previous literature, we find that top five journals’ articles generally receive more citations and that the life cycles of those citations are longer. However, their influence (in term of citations) is overestimated: in its first twenty (five) years since publication, the median top five article accumulates 4.25 (around 3) as many citations when compared to the second tier and top field median article. We show that this ratio is strongly associated with the field of economics research (e.g. this ratio is the lowest for econometric methods papers) and with articles’ impact (e.g. in all fields of economics research, except for theory, this ratio decreases sharply as one moves toward high-impact articles in term of citations).