Health Economics

• 1. Introduction

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  Health Economics is a monthly, peer-reviewed academic journal published by John Wiley & Sons, and it has been part of the scholarly conversation since 1992. Its subject is exactly what its name says: the economics of health and health care. That might sound dry at first. But behind every question about hospital budgets, insurance coverage, and the price of a prescription lies a discipline that shapes decisions affecting millions of people. Who reads this journal? Who writes for it? And where does it stand among the many hundreds of publications competing for the attention of researchers and policymakers? Those are the questions worth following.

• 2. A Journal Takes Shape

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  John Wiley & Sons launched Health Economics in 1992, positioning it as a dedicated venue for scholarship at the intersection of medicine and economic analysis. Before journals like this one existed, research on health spending, resource allocation, and policy trade-offs was scattered across general economics publications and medical literature. A monthly publication cycle means the journal releases new material twelve times a year, keeping pace with a field that responds to real-world policy shifts and public health developments. Peer review sits at the heart of what the journal does: submitted papers face scrutiny from other specialists before they reach readers, which is the discipline's standard quality filter.

• 3. Where It Ranks

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  The Journal Citation Reports gave Health Economics a 2023 impact factor of 2.0. Impact factors measure how often articles published in a journal get cited by other researchers in a given period. A score of 2.0 places the journal 60th out of 118 publications in the "Health Policy & Services" category. In the broader "Health Care Sciences & Services" category, it ranks 92nd out of 174 journals. Across the sprawling field of economics as a whole, the journal sits 207th out of 600 ranked publications. Those numbers put it solidly in the middle of each category, neither at the margins nor at the top of the citation tables. For a field as applied and policy-adjacent as health economics, that mid-range standing reflects a journal serving working researchers rather than chasing prestige rankings.