[1]The authors do not discuss how the 12 liberal arts colleges they list were chosen. It is interesting to note that 5 of the 10 most prolific schools in the rankings presented here are not included in Blair, Cottle, and Wallace's list.

[2]Care was taken to find all the appropriate citations. Although EconLit also includes papers in collected volumes, books, book reviews and working papers, our rankings are based only on journal articles. Authors with more than one affiliation were assigned the first affiliation only. Since the author affiliations reported in EconLit do not indicate the department affiliation, we are counting all publications in economics journals by the faculty (and students) who were at the college at the time the article was published. While we suspect the vast majority of the work was done by economics department members, the ranking accurately reflects economic research at the college. Since the size of the institutions is generally quite small, we believe this is the appropriate measure. The coverage of author affiliation in EconLit prior to 1989 is limited, so we chose to limit the years of our search to 1989-1994.

[3]Swarthmore College presented a difficult case. The regular column in The Journal of Economic Perspectives, "Recommendations for Further Reading," is written by a professor at Swarthmore. There were 21 listings of this column in the data set. The column was omitted from the data used to rank schools. Including the column would increase Swarthmore's rank in all four columns of Table 1. Additionally, including this column would add The Journal of Economic Perspectives to Table 4; it would have 28 articles.

[4]In much of the literature, a quality adjustment is made by ranking according to journal pages instead of journal articles. When comparing articles in similarly ranked journals, using number of pages seems sensible. However, given the wide range of journals in which authors from liberal arts colleges publish, number of pages is a poor proxy for article quality. While a 5 page paper in the AER may be presumed to be of lower quality than a 15 page article in a comparably ranked journal, there is no reason to assume it is of lower quality than a 15 page paper in a much lower ranked journal.

[5] The publications were also highly concentrated among authors. Of the 514 authors in the sample, 115 were responsible for half the articles and only 25 authors had 6 or more articles (which is at least one a year).

[6]Overall, liberal arts faculty had at least one article in 77 of the top 100 journals. There was at least one publication in 240 different journals.