Research Rankings

Evaluating the Research Output of Australian Universities’ Economics Departments

Richard Pomfret and Liang Choon Wang

This paper presents measures of the research output of Australian economics departments. Our study covers the 640 academic staff at rank Lecturer and above in the 27 Australian universities with economics departments containing eight or more staff in April 2002. We construct publication measures based on journal articles, which can be compared with weighted publication measures, and citation measures, which can be compared with the publication measures. Our aim is to identify the robustness of rankings to the choice of method, as well as to highlight differences in focus of departments’ research output. A striking feature of our measures is that the majority of economists in Australian university departments have done no research that has been published in a fairly long list of refereed journals over the last dozen years. They may publish in other outlets, but in any event their work is rarely cited. Thus, average research output is low because many academic economists in Australia do not view research as part of their job or, at least, suffer no penalty from failing to produce substantive evidence of research activity.

We are grateful to Ian Mclean, John Siegfried and John Wilson for helpful comments and the School of Economics for financial support. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2002 Australian Conference of Economists in Glenelg, South Australia.

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• download MS Excel spreadsheet (exe 218kB) (self extracting Zip file)

Subsequent comments and feedback we have received:

• Dr. Michael Brooks, Head of School, School of Economics, University of Tasmania
• Dr. William Coleman, School of Economics, ANU
• Professor John Foster, Head of School, School of Economics, University of Queensland