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On Evaluating Author's Performance by Publications: An Axiomatic Study

Author

Listed:
  • Mukherjee, Conan

    (Department of Economics, Lund University)

  • Alam, Aftab

    (Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India)

Abstract

Administrators in every academic institution across the world have to deal with the unenviable task of comparing researchers on the basis of their academic contributions. Unfortunately, however, there is no reasonably established consensus on the method of arriving at such comparisons, which typically involve trading off accomplishments in teaching, grant writing and academic publication. In this paper, we focus on the particular dimension of academic publication, and analyze this issue from a more fundamental perspective than addressed by the popular h-index (which may lead to unfair and counter-intuitive comparisons in certain situations). In particular, we undertake an axiomatic analysis of all possible ways to measure academic authorship for a given dataset of research articles and find that an egalitarian e-index is the only method which satisfies the axioms of anonymity, monotonicity, and efficiency. This index divides authorship of joint projects equally and sums across all publications of an author.

Suggested Citation

  • Mukherjee, Conan & Alam, Aftab, 2016. "On Evaluating Author's Performance by Publications: An Axiomatic Study," Working Papers 2016:14, Lund University, Department of Economics, revised 12 May 2017.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2016_014
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bouyssou, Denis & Marchant, Thierry, 2014. "An axiomatic approach to bibliometric rankings and indices," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(3), pages 449-477.
    2. Stan J. Liebowitz, 2014. "Willful Blindness: The Inefficient Reward Structure In Academic Research," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 52(4), pages 1267-1283, October.
    3. Woeginger, Gerhard J., 2008. "An axiomatic analysis of Egghe’s g-index," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 2(4), pages 364-368.
    4. Quesada, Antonio, 2011. "Axiomatics for the Hirsch index and the Egghe index," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 5(3), pages 476-480.
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    6. Chambers, Christopher P. & Miller, Alan D., 2014. "Scholarly influence," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 151(C), pages 571-583.
    7. Flores-Szwagrzak, Karol & Treibich, Rafael, 2015. "Co-authorship and the Measurement of Individual Productivity," Discussion Papers on Economics 17/2015, University of Southern Denmark, Department of Economics.
    8. Thierry Marchant, 2009. "An axiomatic characterization of the ranking based on the h-index and some other bibliometric rankings of authors," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 80(2), pages 325-342, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    e-index; h-index; Anonymity; Monotonicity;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • A14 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Sociology of Economics
    • D70 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - General
    • I23 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Higher Education; Research Institutions
    • O30 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - General

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