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This is some kind of a guilty pleasure. It is well known that economists divide Mankind into two groups: economists and non-economists. Which is to say, the best and the rest. But now comes the chance for us rest-dwellers to expose how economists themselves are divided into the best and, well, the rest. In other words, ranking time! Economists live and die by the maxims “publish or perish” and “be cited or perish”. The first gives a quantitative measure of their performance, the second a qualitative one. Tallying these two indicators is not exactly a straightforward business, however. Lots of filters and weights must be applied if a meaningful score is to be obtained. For instance, self-citations must be filtered out. The remaining citations must be weighted according to the importance of the journal in which the articles containing them were published. Authorship of articles having multiple authors must be allotted accordingly. Articles are weighted according to journal importance, and so on and so forth. Then, the time span you consider is also important. The last two years? Ten? Lifetime? This is significant: citations accumulate over time, and usually some time elapses between publication of an article and the appearance of its first citations. And so on. One of the outfits going the extra mile to generate meaningful rankings is the Research Papers in Economics network (RePEc), the world’s largest internet repository of academic economics publications. Over the years, RePEc has refined its tools and criteria for putting together rankings of authors, institutions, countries and states. By now, up to 33 different criteria are used, ranging from number of works, downloads, views and citations, through to the same indicators weighted by simple impact factors, recursive impact factors, or the same discounted by citation age, and other esoteric parameters such as the so-called Wu Index (which indicates that a researcher has published w papers, with at least 10w citations each). While some kinks in the data remain to be filtered out, such as the distortions introduced by the discrepancy between the institutions a researcher is affiliated with and the country in which he or she actually conducts his research, the RePEc ranking remains one of the most thorough and reliable of its kind, albeit dependent on authors actually taking the time to register with RePEc: being an economist does not include you automatically in the network. This means that the ranking is necessarily imperfect, but still fairly formidable. Below is the RePEc ranking of economists working in Germany. All those attributed by RePEc to Germany solely on account of their affiliation to a German-based network have been purged from the list. The list was compiled with the information available on the RePEc website on May 25th, 2011. The ranking results from the harmonic average of the international score according to each of the various criteria employed by RePEc, with the exclusion of number of works, best and worst score, and Wu factor. Over half of the top-25 are members of the CESifo Research Network.If you want to see the criteria used by RePEc in constructing its author rankings, click here.
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Note: This text is the responsibility of the writer (Julio C. Saavedra) and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of either the CESifo Research Network Members cited or of the CESifo Group Munich. Copyright © CESifo GmbH 2006. All rights reserved. |