Environmental and ecological economics in the 21st century: An age adjusted citation analysis of the influential articles, journals, authors and institutions

We investigate the influence of articles, authors, journals and institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics. We depart from studies that investigated the literature until 2001 and include a time period that has witnessed an enormous increase of importance in the field. We adjust for the age effect given the huge impact of the year of an article's publication on its influence and we show that this adjustment does make a substantial difference - especially for disaggregated units of analysis with diverse age characteristics such as articles or authors. We analyse 6597 studies on environmental and ecological economics published between 2000 and 2009. We provide rankings of the influential articles, authors, journals and institutions and find that Ecological Economics, Energy Economics and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management have the most influential articles, they publish very influential authors and their articles are cited most. The University of Maryland, Resources for the Future, the University of East Anglia and the World Bank appear to be the most influential institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics.

► We investigate the influence of articles, authors, journals and institutions in environmental and ecological economics. ► We analyse 6597 studies published between 2000 and 2009. ► We adjust for the age effect and use various criteria for influence. ► With articles, journals and institutions, there are clear 'leaders'. ► With authors, influence is very sensitive to the criterion used.