Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Quality of Economics Research Funded by the ARC

The ARC has carried out an evaluation of the citation impact of the publications derived from ARC funded research. The main finding (full report on ARC website) is that ARC funded publications receive more citations than other Australian publications and other global publications. That is good, but it is hard to have an intuitive sense I think of what the Australian or global averages are. So I looked at the data for economics to get a better idea. The ARC counted the number of publications and the number of citations received by them in the Web of Science from 2001-2005. This means that the average publication had two years in which to receive citations.

There were 202 ARC funded publications which received 320 citations in the period. This is, therefore, an impact factor of roughly of 0.79 (i.e. 0.79 citations received per year). There were 1311 other publications from the university sector receiving 1569 citations for an impact factor of 0.60.

Referring to ISI's "Journal Citation Reports" economics journals with a two year impact factor of 0.79 were ranked 93rd out of 209 economics journals. Kyklos has the closest score. Economic Development and Cultural Change, Review of Income and Wealth, Quantitative Finance, Cambridge Journal of Economics, and Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control are examples of other journals with close scores.

An impact factor of 0.60 resulted in a rank of 133rd out of 209. Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics is closest. Journal of Economic Issues, Journal of Macroeconomics, Geneva Risk and Insurance Review are some of the journals in this neighborhood.

I think this gives a more intuitive understanding of the quality of average Australian and ARC funded research in economics.

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