Ranking of economic blogs

There are many blogs about economics out there. Some are more academic, others are addressed to the general public and therefore more popular and some are generally ignored like this one.

There are also some websites that provide economic blog rankings. But none, as far as I’m concerned, has put together the two dimensions above together. In any case, the real reason of this post is that I wanted to create my own ranking based on these very dimensions: quality and popularity.

The method I used is pretty simple. First, I took the 75 best blogs in economics according to econacademics. This website ranks blogs by the number of academic papers linked in their posts. For example, the first one is: Economic logic, which has linked so far more than 900 academic papers. I took the econacademic ranking as a proxy for quality.

The second step was to check their Google PageRank value as a measure of the popularity dimension. In short, the higher the value at Google PageRank, the more likely to be in the front page of any search at Google.

The result of both dimensions is plotted in the following chart:

Apparently, there is a negative correlation between popularity and number of academic papers. So, if you are a blogger who wants more clicks remember not to talk about academic papers!


The next step was to rank them all by a single method. What I did is basically sum the two rank values for each blog.

And the winner is:

#	blog	rank quality	rank popularity	sum of ranks
1	Stumbling and Mumbling	2	13	15
2	Economist's View	15	5	20
3	Environmental and Urban Economics	5	15	20
4	Economic Logic	1	23	24
5	Organizations and Markets	13	14	27
6	Marginal Revolution	26	2	28
7	Environmental Economics	22	8	30
8	Club Troppo	9	21	30
9	NEP-DGE blog	4	26	30
10	RePEc blog	20	11	31
11	Grasping Reality with the Invisible Hand	30	3	33
12	NEP-HIS blog	11	24	35
13	NEP-LTV blog	7	28	35
14	The Irish Economy	19	17	36
15	Nada Es Gratis	10	30	40
16	The Reality-Based Community	35	9	44
17	Worthwhile Canadian Initiative	29	16	45
18	The Big Picture	43	4	47
19	Simoleon Sense	14	33	47
20	Overcoming Bias	41	7	48