Following the impact factor: Utilitarianism or academic compliance?

The use of impact factors has grown substantially in academia and publishing far beyond their original intended use. They are now used extensively in academic and research assessments as well as in the promotion of journals, publishers, institutions and individuals. The implications of such metricisation for understandings of research quality are discussed as well as for research strategies, the commercialisation of academic publishing, the disciplining of academic knowledge and publishing strategies, knowledge development and the further neoliberalisation of higher education. The paradoxes and problems of current and potential future directions are discussed including with respect to the development of open access publications

Ranking Economists on the Basis of Many Indicators: An Alternative Approach Using RePEc Data

In socio-economic sciences the RePEc network (Research Papers in Economics) has become an essential source for the gathering and the spread of both existing and new economic research. Furthermore, it is currently the largest bibliometric database in economic sciences containing 33 different indicators for more than 30,000 economists. Based on this bibliographic information RePEc calculates well-known rankings for authors and academic institutions. We provide some cautionary remarks concerning the interpretation of some provided bibliometric measures in RePEc. Moreover, we show how individual and aggregated rankings can be biased due to the employed ranking methodology. In order to select key in-dicators describing and assessing research performance of scientist, we propose to apply principal component analysis in this data-rich environment. This approach allows us to assign weights to each indicator prior to aggregation. We illustrate the approach by providing a new overall ranking of economists based on RePEc data.RePEc, ranking aggregation, principal components analysis, economics profession