Faculty Ratings of Major Economics Departments by Citations: An Extension

Abstract

Paul Davis and Gustav Papanek (1984) ranked major economics departments by citations; however, their approach was not novel. Dennis Gerretz and Richard McKenzie (1978) initiated the use of citations to rank economics departments. Though they ranked only southern economics departments for the years 1976 and 1977, GerritzMcKenzie used both total citations and mean citations as ranking criteria. As Davis-Papanek and Gerritz-McKenzie have shown, the citation-ranking approach eliminates many of the problems of ranking departments using journal articles and offers a qualitative as well as quantitative measure of faculty productivity. Both studies, however, ranked only Ph.D. granting institutions and ignored those economics departments which offer a master's degree as the highest degree awarded. Although many Ph.D.granting departments have master's programs, these institutions tend to concentrate on training future academicians and to treat the master's degree as a consolation prize for unsuccessful Ph.D. students. While non-Ph.D.-granting institutions may have different incentives, teaching loads, computer and library support, and quality and extent of graduate research assistantships, we use a citations-based criterion to demonstrate that these institutions should not be neglected as sources of economic research.' Column (1) of Table 1 shows the ranking of economics departments offering the master's degree as the highest degree based upon the average number of citations for the years 1977-1981 for department faculties denoted in the 1982 catalogs of their respective institutions (ties are ranked equally). Our procedure differs from Davis-Papanek in that they averaged citations from 1978 and 1981 only. Given the wide range of faculty size, column (2) denotes the mean citation per faculty member per year. As Davis-Papanek found for Ph.D.-granting institutions, the rankings do change significantly. Four of the top ten departments are replaced by smaller departments and there is considerable shuffling among the remaining top ten departments. Since Davis-Papanek included faculty members citing their own work, this may bias one of the major advantages of using citations instead of the number of major journal publications; that is, citations measure the quality of a person's research in stimulating further research by others. Column (3) ranks departments by citations per year adjusting for self-citations. In some cases this correction is important. For example, Auburn moves from 9th to 15th, Brigham Young from 5th to 13th, and West Texas State from 12th to 6th. In general, there is a high correlation between the two rankings (the Spearman rank correlation coefficient is .99). Another potential weakness of a citation index is the fact that one article cited ten times is weighted equally with ten articles cited once each. It would be an interesting exercise to examine how innovations in the literature (as measured by citations per article) compare between master's only institutions, and middleto lower-ranked Ph.D. programs. Because Davis-Papanek do not separate the number of articles cited from the number of citations, we are unable to make this comparison. For this reason, the number of articles is not reported in our tables. For master's only institutions, the * Blair and Wallace: Department of Economics, Clemson University, 222 Sirrin Hall, Clemson, SC 29631; Cottle: University of Mississippi. We thank an anonymous referee for helpful suggestions on a earlier draft. Any remaining errors are our own. 'Philip Graves et al. (1982) included master's only institutions in their publications-based rankings.

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