Freakonometrics

In France, researchers in economics are evaluated based on their publications in economics journals. In 2008, there was a list (that can be found here) where journals appear in some categories, namely

• macroeconomics (macro), Journal of Economic Growth, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking
• human resources (HR), Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Human Resources, Personnel Psychology
• law (law), International Review of Law and Economics, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Journal of Legal Studies
• production and operation management (operation), International Journal of Production Economics, Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management
• marketing (marketing), Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science
• industrial organization (industrial), International Journal of Industrial Organization, Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, Journal of Industrial Economics,RAND Journal of Economics
• public economics (public), Journal of Public Economics, Public Choice, Social Choice and Welfare
• operations research (OR), European Journal of Operational Research, Mathematical Programming, Mathematics of Operations Research, Operations Research
• health economics (health), American Journal of Public Health, Health Economics, Journal of Health Economics, Social Science and Medicine
• information systems (IS), European Journal of Information Systems, Information Systems Research, Journal of MIS, MIS Quarterly
• development and transition economics (developement), Economic Development and Cultural Change, Economics of Transition, Journal of Comparative Economics, Journal of Development Economics, World Bank Economic Review,World Development
• urban, spatial and regional economics (urban), Economic Geography, Journal of Economic Geography, Journal of Urban Economics
• strategy and management (strategy), Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal
• economic theory, econometrics, games and decision (theory), Econometric Theory, Economic Theory, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Mathematical Economics
• labor economics (labor), Demography, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Labor Economics
• innovation and entrepreneurship (innovation), Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Product Innovation Management
• history of economic thought (hist), Economic History Review, Economics and Philosphy, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, History of Political Economy,Journal of Economic History
• finance and insurance (finance), Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies
• agriculture, environmental and energy (agr), American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Ecological Economics, Journal of Environmental and Economic Management
• accouting and auditing (acc), Accounting Review, Accounting, Organization and Society, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, Review of Accounting Studies

I just focus here on (so called) top journals in each category. It is possible to look (as done here) at projections of journals on the two first principal components, built on words that appear in titles of the articles. I use here the same methodology as the one I used earlier (e.g. I skip common words like and or with). I tried to use keywords, but in my dataset, some (actually, a lot of them) journals do not give that information... so I did not use it.
Here, we obtain the following

(categories are plotted here as supplementary observations). Here is a zoom,

So, on the upper right, we have marketing and industrial economics journals, while health is below. If we look at words projected on those two axis,

In the lower part, we find health, social or development. In the upper part is dynamics, systems or problem. So far, so good...
But recall that there is also a so called general category in the list,

• general (general), Administrative Science Quarterly, American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Political Economy, Management Science, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Economic Journal, European Economic Review, International Economic Review, Journal of Economic Perspectives

So, I was wondering where those journals appear in the principal component analysis. We might expect them to be at the origin (since we rescale our counts, in order to focus on frequency of words in titles, not length of titles, or number of articles per year). But actually when we look at words per category, with general as a supplementary variable, we observe the following

(the axis obtained on categories as observations are rather closed to the one we had on journals as observations, but it looks like - here - the second axis has been inverted). Words are closed also from the one we got before,

So it looks like general journals deal with time and dynamics, as well as problems... But obviously, those general journals do not care about health or human resources. Now, if we run an automatic hierarchical classification, general is quite far away from the other journals,

Some cluster are quite intuitive (macro economics and finance, or theory and operation research), and general belongs to none of them.
So in some sense, general journals cannot be connected to any categories. Except perhaps if we look closer: some journals belong to some categories, like Management Science and Journal of Economic Perspective.

So finally, it looks like two journals should be removed from that list, and then, general journals would be in the middle, i.e. they would be truly transversal, or generalist.