Billions of euros are allocated every year to university research. Increased specialisation and international integration of research and researchers has sharply raised the need for comparisons of performance across fields, institutions and individual researchers. However, there is still no consensus regarding how such rankings should be conducted and what output measures are appropriate to use. We rank all full professors in a particular discipline, economics, in one European nation using seven established, and some of them commonly used, measures of research performance. Our examination shows both that the rank order can vary greatly across measures, and that depending on the measure used the distribution of total research out-put is valued very differently. The renowned KMS measure in economics stands out among the measures analysed here. It exhibits the weakest correlation with the others used in our study. We conclude by giving advice to funding councils and others assessing research quality on how to think about the use of both quantitative and qualitative measures of performance.
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Length: 29 pages Date of creation: 04 Mar 2008 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:hhs:hastef:0693
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Find related papers by JEL classification: A11 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Role of Economics; Role of Economists A14 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Sociology of Economics B41 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Economic Methodology - - - Economic Methodology
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David N. Laband & Robert D. Tollison, 2003.
"Dry Holes in Economic Research,"
Kyklos,
Blackwell Publishing, vol. 56(2), pages 161-173, 05.
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