nep-sog New Economics Papers
on Sociology of Economics
Issue of 2009‒01‒24
three papers chosen by
Jonas Holmström
Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration

  1. Three Failed Attempts of Joint Rankings of Research in Economics and Business By Albers, Sönke
  2. World-Leading Research and its Measurement By Oswald, Andrew J.
  3. Assessing scientific research performance and impact with single indices By Panaretos, John; Malesios, Chrisovaladis

  1. By: Albers, Sönke
    Abstract: The attempts by Schulze, Warning, and Wiermann (2008) and Ritzberger (2008) to develop a joint ranking list of journals for economics and business research are critically evaluated. The results show a lack of sufficient knowledge of the quality of business journals. Based on these obscure journal rankings, Fabel, Hein, and Hofmeister (2008) derive a ranking of universities and departments. While Diamantopoulos and Wagner (2008) already show a lack of face-validity of these results, this article explains that the reason for this lies not only in the obscure weighting of the journals but, even more importantly, in a remarkable incompleteness of the data base.
    Keywords: Journal ranking; university ranking
    JEL: M00 A12 I23
    Date: 2008–12–23
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:12868&r=sog
  2. By: Oswald, Andrew J. (University of Warwick)
    Abstract: Journalists and others have asked me whether the favourable RAE 2008 results for UK economics are believable. This is a fair question. It also opens up a broader and more important one: how can we design a bibliometric method to assess the quality (rather than merely quantity) of a nation’s science? To try to address this, I examine objective data on the world’s most influential economics articles. I find that the United Kingdom performed reasonably well over the 2001-2008 period. Of 450 genuinely world-leading journal articles, the UK produced 10% of them -- and was the source of the most-cited article in each of the Journal of Econometrics, the International Economic Review, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Rand Journal of Economics, and of the second most-cited article in the Journal of Health Economics. Interestingly, more than a quarter of these world-leading UK articles came from outside the best-known half-dozen departments. Thus the modern emphasis on ‘top’ departments and the idea that funding should be concentrated in a few places may be mistaken. Pluralism may help to foster iconoclastic ideas.
    Keywords: Science ; evaluation ; peer-review ; citations ; research assessment exercise.
    Date: 2009
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wrk:warwec:887&r=sog
  3. By: Panaretos, John; Malesios, Chrisovaladis
    Abstract: We provide a comprehensive and critical review of the h-index and its most important modifications proposed in the literature, as well as of other similar indicators measuring research output and impact. Extensions of some of these indices are presented and illustrated.
    Keywords: Citation metrics; Research output; h-index; Hirsch index; h-type indices
    JEL: I2
    Date: 2008–12–17
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:12842&r=sog

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