Journal interaction. A bibliometric analysis of economics journals

International audienceCitation analysis is widely used as an evaluation method within sciences. This paper seeks to qualify citation analyses by adding insight into the sciences under investigation. The paper presents a method of citation analysis using multiple linear regressions on both cited and citing economic journals. The proposed method controls for the different characteristics of the journals as well as for their degree of interaction. The paper shows some of the hidden structures within the economic science 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