nep-sog New Economics Papers
on Sociology of Economics
Issue of 2008‒03‒08
three papers chosen by
Jonas Holmström
Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration

  1. HOW SHOULD RESEARCH PERFORMANCE BE MEASURED? EVIDENCE FROM RANKINGS OF ACADEMIC ECONOMISTS By Henrekson, Magnus; Waldenström, Daniel
  2. Some Evidence on the Future of Economics By Oswald, Andrew J; Ralsmark, Hilda
  3. Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis By Eck, N.J.P. van; Waltman, L.

  1. By: Henrekson, Magnus (Dept. of Economics, Stockholm School of Economics); Waldenström, Daniel (Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN))
    Abstract: Billions of euros are allocated every year to university research. Increased specialisation and international integration of research and researchers has sharply raised the need for comparisons of performance across fields, institutions and individual researchers. However, there is still no consensus regarding how such rankings should be conducted and what output measures are appropriate to use. We rank all full professors in a particular discipline, economics, in one European nation using seven established, and some of them commonly used, measures of research performance. Our examination shows both that the rank order can vary greatly across measures, and that depending on the measure used the distribution of total research out-put is valued very differently. The renowned KMS measure in economics stands out among the measures analysed here. It exhibits the weakest correlation with the others used in our study. We conclude by giving advice to funding councils and others assessing research quality on how to think about the use of both quantitative and qualitative measures of performance.
    Keywords: Impact of research; Ranking; Research productivity; Bibliometrics; Impact Factor
    JEL: A11 A14 B41
    Date: 2008–03–04
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:hastef:0693&r=sog
  2. By: Oswald, Andrew J (Department of Economics, University of Warwick); Ralsmark, Hilda (Department of Economics, University of Warwick)
    Abstract: This short paper collects and studies the CVs of 112 assistant professors in the top-ten American departments of economics. The paper treats these as a glimpse of the future. We find evidence of a strong brain drain. We find also a predominance of empirical work.
    Date: 2008
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wrk:warwec:841&r=sog
  3. By: Eck, N.J.P. van; Waltman, L. (Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), RSM Erasmus University)
    Abstract: We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.
    Keywords: author cocitation analysis;similarity measure;Pearson correlation;cosine;information science
    Date: 2007–12–13
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:eureri:1765010889&r=sog

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