Clark’s century-old, internationally recognized scholarly journal Economic Geography achieved a nearly 24 percent increase in citation rankings for 2025, confirming its reputation as the leading publication the field, according to Editor-in-Chief Siobhan McGrath.
“These results have been achieved principally by outgoing editor-in-chief Jim Murphy, the outgoing editors, and the continuing efforts of managing editor Hilary Laraba, as well as the authors who chose to submit their work to the journal, the international editorial board members, and the journal’s peer reviewers,” said McGrath, associate professor of geography in Clark’s School of Climate, Environment, and Society.
“I am sure that I speak for the editorial team — including the editors appointed in 2025 — and the newly expanded editorial board when I say the bar has been set high,” she added.
Murphy, professor and director of geography and the journal’s book editor, served as editor-in-chief for 11 years, ending his run with a celebration of the journal’s 100th year. President Wallace Atwood founded the journal in March 1925. In the journal’s charter, Atwood specified that its editor-in-chief would come from the Graduate School of Geography, which he also founded.
The journal received an impact factor — which indicates how often its articles are cited — of 11 for 2025 vs. 8.9 in 2024, according to Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports.
Economic Geography ranked second out of 174 geography journals, in the 99th percentile for 2025 (up from 98th for 2024), and seventh out of 626 economics journals, in the 99th percentile (up from 98th for 2024). On the Journal Citation Indicator, which corrects for the different citation patterns across fields, it ranked first in out of 174 geography journals.
“These are not abstract numbers. They reflect the quality, ambition and reach of the work the journal publishes, and the standing it has built over decades as one of the flagship outlets in the discipline,” Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, the Princesa de Asturias Chair and professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics (LSE) and an editor for Economic Geography, said in a LinkedIn post celebrating the journal’s achievements.
Rodríguez-Pose noted that his article, “The Geography of EU Discontent and the Regional Development Trap,” with Lewis Dijkstra and Hugo Poelman, both of whom have served with the European Commission, is one of the most-cited during the ranking period.
“Achievements of this kind are never the work of one person; they are built patiently, issue by issue, by editors who set the bar high and keep it there,” he said.
In top photo, from left: Members of the Economic Geography journal team celebrate its 100th anniversary at the 7th Global Conference on Economic Geography in 2025: former editor-in-chief and current book review editor Jim Murphy, managing editor Hilary Laraba, editor Karen Lai, editor-in-chief Siobhan McGrath, former editor-in-chief and current editorial board member Yuko Aoyama, and former editor and current editorial board member Henry Wai-Chung Yeung. (Photo by Nathan Fiske)
