Abstract
One of the more important measures of a scholar’s research impact is the number of times that the scholar’s work is cited by other researchers as a source of knowledge. This paper conducts a first of its kind examination on Israel’s academic economists and economics departments, ranking them according to the number of citations on their work. It also provides a vista into one of the primary reasons given by junior Israeli economists for an unparalleled brain drain from the country—discrepancies between research impact and promotion. The type of examination carried out in this paper can now be easily replicated in other fields and in other countries utilizing freely available citations data and compilation software that have been made readily accessible in recent years.
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Notes
As noted by one of the referees, the current RAE is based on both peer review and bibliometric measures while the next RAE will be conducted only on the basis of bibliometric measures.
In the past, this used to be called Institute of Scientific Information Web of Science (ISI).
The most accurate way to rank all of a country’s academic economists would be to go over every one of the papers listed under a particular economist’s name, throw out those papers belonging to identical names who are not the same person, correct for typos and abbreviations in titles and authorship and then compare with cv’s received from each individual. The scope of such an examination to remove all of this extra data “noise” would be so prohibitively time-consuming—and, as a result, expensive—that it would render the project unfeasible. It is probably no coincidence that such examination was never carried out in Israel and why they are so rare in the rest of the world. On the other hand, assuming that this kind of unavoidable noise (unavoidable to the extent that it is unfeasible to eliminate) exists for all authors as a relatively similar proportion of their entire citations, then this should not have too great affect on the relative rankings. The finding of the detailed comparison studies cited here as well as in the detailed examination of the citations receive by this author’s past research on the relationship between rankings in GS and in WoS would appear to corroborate this assumption. Hence, from a cost-benefit perspective, in light of the new range of possibilities that have become available only recently—and implemented in this paper—the large extra cost of a meticulous paper by paper examination would yield limited additional tangible benefits in the form of substantial changes to the rankings found here.
Can be accessed from http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm.
These websites only distinguish between professors and doctors. They do not go into the finer resolution of associate versus full professor nor lecturer versus senior lecturer. The departments were reluctant to release that information, hence the analysis here distinguishes only between professors and doctors.
The complete list is available upon request.
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Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Omer Moav and Arik Tamir for their comments and to Yuval Erez for his research assistance.