nep-sog New Economics Papers
on Sociology of Economics
Issue of 2017‒10‒15
three papers chosen by
Jonas Holmström
Axventure AB

  1. Academic rankings and pluralism : the case of Brazil and the new version of Qualis By Ian Coelho de Souza Almeida; Rafael Galvão de Almeida; Lucas Resende de Carvalho
  2. Emergent structures in faculty hiring networks, and the effects of mobility on academic performance By Cowan, Robin; Rossello, Giulia
  3. Specifying Social Weight Matrices of Researcher Networks: The Case of Academic Economists By Katarina Zigova

  1. By: Ian Coelho de Souza Almeida (Cedeplar-UFMG); Rafael Galvão de Almeida (Cedeplar-UFMG); Lucas Resende de Carvalho (Cedeplar-UFMG)
    Abstract: The paper approaches the theme of the relatively higher level of pluralism in Brazilian economics, when compared to the other countries, from a different approach used in the literature. Considering the Qualis as an instrument of great impact in the research of the Brazilian graduate education centers, mainly because of its impact in the CAPES evaluation of the centers, we analyze the abrupt change in the journal ranking that occurred in 2016. Before presenting this data, we first focused in understanding the metrics that are part of the Qualis, and how relevant the biases from other indexes than the Impact Factor are. Afterwards, we present a review of the national literature concerning the academic production in economics, showing how some problems due to incentives and structure still persist. We, then, present our results: we found out that the increase of journals in the higher strata of the Qualis without a research agenda bias, and with a great inclusion of specialized sub-fields of the discipline. Besides, the impact that this change will cause in the 2017 CAPES’ evaluation cannot be seen as favoring centers by their division in mainstream and non-mainstream. Having this in mind, we argue that the modifications keep incentives to pluralism, besides correcting many problems in the ranking.
    Keywords: Qualis, academic production, pluralism, bibliometrics, mainstream economics, heterodox economics
    JEL: A23 A14 B00
    Date: 2017–10
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdp:texdis:td569&r=sog
  2. By: Cowan, Robin (UNU-MERIT, Maastricht University); Rossello, Giulia (UNU-MERIT, Maastricht University)
    Abstract: This paper is about the South African job market for PhDs. PhD to first job mobility involves the preferences of both the hiring institution and the candidate. Both want to make the best choice and here institutional prestige plays a crucial role. A university’s prestige is an emergent property of the hiring interactions, so we use a network perspective to measure it. Using this emergent ordering, we compare the subsequent scientific performance of scholars with different changes in the prestige hierarchy. We ask how movements between universities of different prestige from PhD to first job correlates with academic performance. We use data of South African scholars from 1970 to 2004 and we find that those who make large movements in terms of prestige have lower research ratings than those wo do not. Further, those with higher prestige PhD or first job have high research ratings throughout their careers.
    Keywords: Academia, South Africa, faculty hiring network, institutional prestige, institutional stratification, scholars research performance, university system, matched pair analysis
    JEL: D7 I2 J15 O31 O32 O33 Z13
    Date: 2017–10–04
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unm:unumer:2017046&r=sog
  3. By: Katarina Zigova (Department of Economics, University of Konstanz, Germany)
    Abstract: This paper shows how collaboration and citation networks can be used to specify social weight matrices for a community of researchers. I use two competing theories of social influence on individual behavior, namely communication and comparison. I argue that in research networks collaboration captures communication, while citation captures comparison. I further argue that the comparison principle is likely to be the main social driver of individual research productivity and suggest a benchmark social weight matrix based on this principle. I test the benchmark matrix against several alternatives using a Bayesian model comparison procedure and conclude that the benchmark matrix outperforms alternative specifications. This result lends support to socio-economic theories underling the benchmark specification of the social weight matrix.
    Keywords: collaboration and citation networks, social weight matrix, network autocorrelation, research productivity
    JEL: C21 D83 I23
    Date: 2017–10–04
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:knz:dpteco:1710&r=sog

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