This study presents a bibliometric analysis of the top five economics journals during the period 2012–2016 and provides helpful insights into the document types, the distribution of country/territories, the distribution of institutions, the geographical distribution of authors, the most active authors and their research interests or fields, the co‐authorship network, and global/local cooperation. This paper also provides valuable information about the core historical references and the hottest new papers through co‐citation analysis and citation analysis. A co‐word analysis based on the keywords and thematic noun‐phrases in the titles and abstracts of the sample papers was used to explore the hot research topics in the top five journals (e.g. ‘price’, ‘game’, ‘consumption’, ‘income’, ‘international trade’, ‘employment’, ‘monetary policy’, ‘welfare effects’ and ‘developing countries’). In addition, a comparative keyword analysis was used to explore the differences in the directions and characteristics of each journal and the changes in research focuses between ‘new’ and ‘old’ studies. The analytical methods of this study differ from those of reviews or previous studies, and the results fill the gaps not covered by those works.

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