On journal rankings and researchers' abilities

Wojciech Charemza, Michał Lewandowski and Łukasz Woźny

No 2023-092, KAE Working Papers from Warsaw School of Economics, Collegium of Economic Analysis

Abstract: Over the last few years, ranking lists of academic journals have become one of the key indicators for evaluating individual researchers, departments and universities. How to optimally design such rankings? What can we learn from commonly used journal ranking lists? To answer these questions, we propose a simple model of optimal rewards for publication in academic journals. Based on a principal-agent model with researchers' hidden abilities, we characterize the second-best journal reward system, where all available journals are assigned to one of several categories or ranks. We provide a tractable example that has a closed-form solution and allows numerical applications. Finally, we show how to calibrate the distribution of researchers' ability levels from the observed journal ranking schemes.

Keywords: journal rankings; publication reward mechanisms; optimal categorization; journal quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D61 I23 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2023-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic and nep-sog
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http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12182/1175 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: On journal rankings and researchers' abilities (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sgh:kaewps:2023092

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