A New Model of Scholarly Impact Factor

|Peter Boettke|

Peter Klein points to this paper proposing an alternative measure of scholarly impact.

Many within our general camp, e.g., Leland Yeager, have criticized the academic focus on counting publications and citation studies to the exclusion of making informed judgements based on reading the work.  I have much sympathy with Yeager's position, but I also think that is because Yeager was a highly productive scholar.  The best economists are nearly always high quality and high output producers, and not merely high quality.  The reason for this is simple, I think --- good economists find the world amazingly interesting 24/7 and want to communicate the insights they believe they have on the world.  In other words, they have something they want to get off their chest, so they write, they talk, they think, and they write and talk some more.

So I think EconLit, SSCI, SSRN, RePC are important tools for those of us competing in this academic game.  I don't think Google Scholar or programs such as 'publish or perish' are all that accurate, though personally I benefit whenever those measures are consulted.  All measures I think have imperfections in them and you need to know how the different measures are weighted and what they are missing in their measure.  But if truth be told, if you are truly a high impact scholar it will show on each of these measures.  SSCI sets the standard while Google Scholar captures the widest impact measure -- but the best and the brightest economists do outstanding on both.  So as a general rule to young economists trying to figure out the state of the discipline, look at SSCI impact factors for scholars and for journals, look at EconLit for sheer productivity.  Know SSRN or RePC measures but realize that when they deviate from SSCI you should think about what is going on.

Comments

[George Selgin]

A very big problem that's often overlooked with cites=impact is that it favors producers of intermediate goods over producers of final goods: you get a lot of points for producing a tool, even a relatively modest one, that lots of other paper-writers can use, whereas the return to simply revealing some previously unrecognized truth about the economy is likely to be a lot lower. The increasing emphasis on impact factors has tended for this reason to cause over-investment in higher-order goods and less and less output of the sort that might, for example, make its way into textbooks or still popular outlets.

Alas, there are no signs of an impending bust.

[George Selgin]

For "still popular" read "still more popular."