In order to arrive at informed judgments about the quality of research institutions and individual scholars, funding agencies, academic employers and researchers have turned to publication rankings. While such rankings, often based on journal citations, promise a more efficient and transparent funding allocation, individual researchers are at risk of showing adaptive behavior. This paper investigates whether the use of journal rankings in assessing the quality of scholarly research results in the unintended consequence of researchers adapting their research topics to the publishing interests of high-ranked journals. The introduction of the Handelsblatt Ranking (HBR) for economists in German language institutions serves as a quasi-natural experiment, allowing for an examination of research topic dynamics in economics via topic modeling and text classification. It is found that the Handelsblatt Ranking did not cause a significant shift of topics researched by German-affiliated authors in comparison to their international counterparts, even though topic convergence is apparent.