Journal of Documentation

Purpose – Citation analysis is widely used as an evaluation method within sciences. The purpose of this paper is to use citation analyses to add insight into the interaction between economics journals.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a method of citation analysis using multiple linear regressions on both cited and citing economics journals. The proposed method controls for the different characteristics of the journals as well as for their degree of interaction.

Findings – The paper shows some of the hidden structures within the science of economics that are determinants for the results from citation analysis. The analysis indicates several underlying factors within citation patterns in economics that should be accounted for when doing citation analysis for evaluation purposes. A journal is to a large extent self-supplying with citations but, when this is extracted from the data, journals are dependent on similar journals – with respect to sub-discipline, geography and JIF – to supply citations.

Research limitations/implications – The analysis in this paper includes only a sub-set of the journals of the science of economics and other sciences may exhibit other patterns and thus other underlying factors.

Practical implications – In an evaluation that takes place across a wide board of sciences an analysis of both cited and citing journals may help to determine which factors should be taken into account in the evaluation.

Originality/value – This type of analysis enables one to analyse some of the characteristics that separate the sciences.