| Abstract: |
The request for a strengthening of academic research at the German economic
research institutes by the German Science Council more than a decade ago was
founded on the crucial insight that sound policy advice - the traditional task
of the institutes - can only be guaranteed in the long term if it is based on
applied research carried out within the institutes themselves. Based on
publications in academic journals, the central criterion of research
evaluation, research output has improved remarkably in scope and quality and
has involved an ever rising number of scholars within the institutes. It can
be considered to be a substantial success of German reform policy, which
should be internationally recognized. The present study demonstrates the
implications of different methods of filtering and weighting research output
to measure publication performance. The ranking of the institutes computed
here on the basis of a wide range of alternative concepts provides fairly
robust findings. The results are distorted, however, if they are based on a
highly selective list of journals as was the case in previous literature. |