Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Better rankings of economists

RePEc has been providing rankings for the economics profession for several years, but one aspect that was severely undermining their credibility was that the country rankings were in many cases meaningless. The problem was that economists with multiple affiliations in several countries were ranked equally in all countries. The German rankings, for example, were dominated by Americans with courtesy appointments in local institutes.

This month's rankings appear to have fixed this problem by attributing to each affiliation some weight, penalizing such courtesy appointments. National rankings now look much more reasonable, and the worldwide ranking of institutions is not dominated by these institutes any more. Now if these rankings could cover all economists, not just those who bothered to register...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree this is now a better ranking, but boy does this piss off one of my colleagues who was among the top is several countries...

Anonymous said...

The italian ranking is much improved also. There were lost of outsiders in there, in particular canadiens.