On measuring scientific influence

Martin Ravallion and Adam Wagstaff

No 5375, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Bibliometric measures based on citations are widely used in assessing the scientific publication records of authors, institutions and journals. Yet currently favored measures lack a clear conceptual foundation and are known to have counter-intuitive properties. The authors propose a new approach that is grounded on a theoretical"influence function,"representing explicit prior beliefs about how citations reflect influence. They provide conditions for robust qualitative comparisons of influence -- conditions that can be implemented using readily-available data. An example is provided using the economics publication records of selected universities and the World Bank.

Keywords: Information Security&Privacy; Economic Theory&Research; Information and Records Management; Tertiary Education; Knowledge for Development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-07-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino and nep-sog
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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