Proof over promise: towards a more inclusive ranking of Dutch academics in Economics & Business

Abstract

The Dutch Economics top--40, based on publications in ISI listed journals, is --to the best of our knowledge --the oldest ranking of individual academics in Economics and is well accepted in the Dutch academic community. However, this ranking is based on publication volume, rather than on the actual impact of the publications in question. This paper therefore uses two relatively new metrics, the citations per author per year (CAY) metric and the individual annual h--index (hIa) to provide two alternative, citation--based, rankings of Dutch academics in Economics & Business. As a data source, we use Google Scholar instead of ISI to provide a more comprehensive measure of impact, including citations to and from publications in non--ISI listed journals, books, working and conference papers.The resulting rankings are shown to be substantially different from the original ranking based on publications. Just like other research metrics, the CAY or hIa--index should never be used as the sole criterion to evaluate academics. However, we do argue that the hIa--index and the related citations per author per year metric provide an important additional perspective over and above a ranking based on publications in high impact journals alone. Citation--based rankings are also shown to inject a higher level of diversity in terms of age, gender, discipline and academic affiliation and thus appear to be more inclusive of a wider range of scholarship.3 | P a g e Proof over promise:

Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science: a longitudinal and cross-disciplinary comparison

“…The hIa provides an indication of the average number of impactful single-author equivalent publications an academic publishes per year. We expect its typical value to be well below 1.0 for most academics (Harzing & Mijnhardt, 2015).…”

Everything you always wanted to know about research impact

“…For most academics the hIa will be below 1.0 as it is difficult to keep up a stream of high-impact publications over a sustained period of time. Based on two studies of high-performing academics Harzing & Mijnhardt (2015), suggest that a hIa above 1.0 should be considered to reflect excellent performance. A hIa above 1.5 might be considered to reflect outstanding performance, whereas a hIa above 2.0 can be seen as truly exceptional.…”

What, Who, or Where? Rejoinder to “Identifying Research Topic Development in Business and Management Education Research Using Legitimation Code Theory”

“…As Harzing and Alakangas (2016) have shown, this practice leads to a serious underestimation of citation impact in the Social Sciences and Humanities and, to a lesser extent, Engineering. Likewise, Harzing and Mijnhardt (2015) ranked Dutch economists based on their actual citation levels in GS—which they called proof —rather than on the journal impact factor of their publications in the Web of Science—which they called promise . They found the two rankings to be substantially different.…”