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on Sociology of Economics |
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Issue of 2008‒03‒01
four papers chosen by Jonas Holmström Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration |
| By: | Marco p. Tucci; Sandra Fontani; Silvia Ferrini |
| Abstract: | As pointed out in Amin e Mabe (2000, p. 1), the journal impact factor (IF) “has moved in recent years from an obscure bibliometric indicator to become the chief quantitative measure of the quality of a journal, its research papers, the researchers who wrote those papers, and even the institution they work in.” However, the use of this index for evaluating individual scientists is dubious and may “skew the course of scientific research” (Monastersky, 2005, p, 1). Moreover the IF is, at most, able to measure only the quality of a very restricted range of research activities: namely, publishing journal articles. In the present work a new indicator of a researcher quality, named the Researcher Impact Factor (RF), is introduced. It is constructed as a function of the number and quality of publications (articles, books and working papers) and of the “other activities” usually associated with being a researcher (attending and/or organizing conferences, being the Editor, Associate Editor or referee for a journal, teaching or supervising at graduate level, coordinating research groups and so on). To show the characteristics of the new index, a numerical example is carried out to rank two hypothetical scientists. The main conclusion is that by replacing the IF with the RF in hiring, tenure decisions and awarding of grants would greatly increase the number of topics investigated and the number and quality of long run projects. The Excel spreadsheet used for the computations is available on demand from the authors. |
| Keywords: | Impact factor, bibliometric indices, research evaluation, researcher impact factor |
| JEL: | A11 A12 |
| Date: | 2008–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:usi:wpaper:527&r=sog |
| By: | Ted Bergstrom (University of California, Santa Barbara); Rosemarie Lavaty (UCSB) |
| Abstract: | To answer the question of the paper's title, we looked at the tables of contents from two recent issues of 33 economics journals and attempted to find a freely available online version of each article. We found that about 90 percent of articles in the most-cited economics journals and about 50 percent of articles in less-cited journals are available. We conduct a similar exercise for political science and find that only about 30 percent of the articles are freely available. The paper reports a regression analysis of the effects of author and article characteristics on likelihood of posing and it discusses the implications of self-archiving for the pricing of subscription-based academic journals. |
| Keywords: | open access, self-archiving, academic journals, citations, impact factor, journal prices, |
| Date: | 2007–02–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdl:ucsbec:2007a&r=sog |
| By: | Alberto Baccini; Lucio Barabesi; Marzia Marcheselli |
| Abstract: | The exploratory analysis developed in this paper relies on the hypothesis that each editor possesses some power in the definition of the editorial policy of her journal. Consequently if the same scholar sits on the board of two journals, those journals could have some common elements in their editorial policies. The proximity of the editorial policies of two scientific journals can be assessed by the number of common editors sitting on their boards. A database of all editors of the journals classified as “Statistics & Probability” in the Journal of Citation Report by ISI-Thomson is used. The structure of the network generated by the interlocking editorship is explored applying the instruments of network analysis. Evidences are found of a very compact network. This is interpreted as the result of a common perspective about the appropriate methods for investigating the problems and constructing the theories in the domain of statistics |
| Keywords: | Networks; Journals; Editorial boards; Interlocking editorship; Statisticians |
| JEL: | A |
| Date: | 2008–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:usi:wpaper:524&r=sog |
| By: | Fabian Muniesa (CSI - Centre de sociologie de l'innovation - CNRS : UMR7120 - Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris); Michel Callon (CSI - Centre de sociologie de l'innovation - CNRS : UMR7120 - Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris) |
| Abstract: | Propose quelques développements théoriques sur le thème de la performativité des sciences économiques. |
| Keywords: | Performativité ; performation ; sciences économiques ; sociologie économique ; anthropologie des sciences et des techniques ; théorie de l'acteur-réseau |
| Date: | 2008 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:papers:halshs-00258130_v1&r=sog |