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

Magnus Henrekson () and Daniel Waldenström ()

No 712, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: Billions of dollars 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 country using seven established, and some of them commonly used, meas-ures 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 output is valued very differently.

Keywords: Impact of Research; Ranking; Research Output; Research Productivity; Bibliometrics; Google Scholar; h-index; Impact Factor; SSCI (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 A13 A14 B41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sog
Date: 2007-08-15, Revised 2009-10-22
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ifn.se/wfiles/wp/wp712.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:0712

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics
Address: Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Box 55665, SE-102 15 Stockholm, Sweden
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Elisabeth Gustafsson ().