Russian Economic Journals: Table of Ranks

This paper is devoted to a description of the results of the first part of the research project called «Stratification of the scientific community of economists and ranking of economic journals», developed by a temporary research team of the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) and the National Research University «Higher School of Economics» in cooperation with the New Economic Association. The information base of the study was the opinion poll of economists – participants of The Third Russian Economic Congress «REC–2016» (December 2016), of The Moscow Economic Forum «MEF– 2017» (March 2017) and of The XVIII April International Scientific Conference on Economic and Social Development (April 2017). In the work, described in this article, a fundamentally new universal ranking algorithm of the analyzed publications is proposed, on the basis of sociological measurements of the opinion of the economists' community. The created algorithm is a combined, interconnected and interrelated solution of three theoretical problems: 1) the identification, using the method of principal components of the weight function of aggregating private ratings, reflecting the hidden relationships between the measured characteristics of the journals; 2) the construction of an iterative procedure for determining a subset of experts within the entire set of interviewed experts, or within the entire totality of interviewed experts, that correspond to the specified requirements, and, using their estimates, determination of the base count (aggregated) rating for each journal; 3) the selection of statistically dissimilar publication ratings, on the basis of the T-test for paired samples, and subsequent determination of homogeneous groups of journals, using a cluster analysis. We mean those journals – concerning close values of the base rating within each group and the significant differences between them. The results of a sociological survey of the scientific community of economists are presented, its structure is revealed and the absence of a statistically significant connection between the bibliometric indicators of the Russian Science Citation Index (the RSCI) and the estimates of journals, obtained on the basis of measuring of public opinion, is proved. The main result of the completed research is a methodological and an instrumental justification of the ranking of Russian economic journals and choice of the five categories of periodicals, on its basis.

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