The Merits of Using Citations to Measure Research Output in Economics Departments: The New Zealand Case

David L. Anderson and John Tressler ()

Working Papers in Economics from University of Waikato, Department of Economics

Abstract: In this paper we explore the merits of utilizing citation counts to measure research output in economics in the context of a nation-wide research evaluation scheme. We selected one such system for study: the New Zealand government’s Programme-Based Research Fund (PBRF). Citations were collected for all refereed papers produced by New Zealand’s academic economists over the period 2000 to 2008 using the databases of the ISI/Web of Science and, to a limited extent, Google Scholar. These data allowed us to estimate the time lags in economics between publication of an article and the flow of citations; to demonstrate the impact of alternative definitions of ‘economics-relevant’ journals on citation counts; and to assess the impact of direct citation measures and alternative schemes on departmental and individual performance. Our findings suggest that the time-lags between publication and citing are such that it would be difficult to rely on citations counts to produce a meaningful measure of output in a PBRF-like research evaluation framework, especially one based explicitly on individual assessment.

Keywords: citations; economics departments; journal weighting schemes; PBRF; research output (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A19 C81 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ipr and nep-sog
Date: 2011-06-21
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://mngt.waikato.ac.nz/RePEc/wai/econwp/1111.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:wai:econwp:11/11

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Waikato, Department of Economics
Address: Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand, 3240
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Brian Silverstone ().