ABSTRACT
In 2010, Frederic Lee and Bruce Cronin published an influential ranking of heterodox economic journals, combining traditional citation impact factors with network metrics to indicate a journal’s contribution to distinguishing heterodox economics as an academic sub-field distinct from orthodox economics. Since 2010, and particularly in the context of the Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession, heterodox economics has further consolidated as a distinctive academic sub-field. At the same time, there has been a growing critique of the limitations of traditional citation impact factors as indicators of quality, including the great reductionism inherent in the method, the great variation in citation practices from discipline to discipline, and the limited conception of academic interaction and collaboration modelled. This chapter revisits the Lee–Cronin (2010) rankings, updating the metrics and comparing these to an alternative model, drawing on recent developments in subject-normalised journal impact factors. It is argued that a strong case remains for conceiving heterodox economics as a distinct academic sub-field and considering the implications for institutionalisation of the field.
