Citations or Journal Quality: Which is Rewarded More in the Academic Labor Market?

John Gibson, David L. Anderson () and John Tressler ()
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David L. Anderson: Queen's University

Working Papers in Economics from University of Waikato

Abstract: Research quality can be evaluated using citations or from the prestige of the journal that publishes the research. Recent studies advocate for more weight on citations, which measure actual impact, while the journal where an article publishes is merely a predictor of whether it was thought likely to have an impact. Yet there is little comprehensive evidence on the role of citations versus journal quality in evaluating research. In this paper we use data on tenured economists in the University of California system to relate their salary to their lifetime publications of 5500 articles in almost 700 different academic journals and to the 140,000 citations to these articles. The results show little role for citations in affecting faculty salary, with an impact only one-seventh that of a measure of journal publications. The distribution of citations, whether using an h-index or the generalized h-index proposed by Ellison (2013), is also not a significant predictor of salary.

Keywords: academic salary; citations; h-index; journal rankings; research evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A14 J44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2015-11-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-sog
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Related works:
Journal Article: CITATIONS OR JOURNAL QUALITY: WHICH IS REWARDED MORE IN THE ACADEMIC LABOR MARKET? (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wai:econwp:15/13

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