Confidence Intervals for Recursive Journal Impact Factors

We compute confidence intervals for recursive impact factors, that take into account that some citations are more prestigious than others, as well as for the associated ranks of journals, applying the methods to the population of economics journals. The Quarterly Journal of Economics is clearly the journal with greatest impact, the confidence interval for its rank only includes one. Based on the simple bootstrap, the remainder of the “Top-5” journals are in the top 6 together with the Journal of Finance, while the Xie et al. (2009), and Mogstad et al. (2022) methods generally broaden estimated confidence intervals, particularly for mid-ranking journals. All methods agree that most apparent differences in journal quality are, in fact, mostly insignificant.