Economics places a strong emphasis on publishing in a narrow set of top tier journals. Given that venue reputation does not necessarily go hand in hand with citation performance, we study how citation patterns differ across journal tiers (top five, second tier, and top field). By analyzing citations of 6,083 articles, we find that citation patterns effectively vary greatly across tiers, affecting not only articles’ total citations but also their distribution through time (i.e., their life cycles). Moreover, the way patterns differ across tiers is strongly associated to articles’ success (measured by citation counts) and fields of economics research.

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