How Should Research Performance Be Measured? A Study of Swedish Economists

Magnus Henrekson () and Daniel Waldenström

No 693, SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics

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 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 A14 B41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2008-03-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eff, nep-hrm, nep-ipr, nep-pr~ and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published as Henrekson, Magnus and Daniel Waldenström, 'How Should Research Performance Be Measured? A Study of Swedish Economists' in The Manchester School, 2011, pages 1139-1156.

Downloads: (external link)
http://swopec.hhs.se/hastef/papers/hastef0693.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: HOW SHOULD RESEARCH PERFORMANCE BE MEASURED? A STUDY OF SWEDISH ECONOMISTS (2011)
Working Paper: How Should Research Performance be Measured? A Study of Swedish Economists (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:hastef:0693

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics The Economic Research Institute, Stockholm School of Economics, P.O. Box 6501, 113 83 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Helena Lundin ().