| By: |
Battistin, Erich (Queen Mary, University of London);
Ovidi, Marco (Queen Mary, University of London) |
| Abstract: |
We use the UK's 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) to study which
attributes characterize a top-scoring (four-star) publication in Economics and
Econometrics. We frame the analysis as a classification problem and, using
information in official documents, derive conditions to infer the unobservable
score that panellists awarded to each publication. Juxtaposing institutions'
submissions with REF outcomes provides information on the latent pass-marks
used for assigning quality levels, which respond to journal prestige measured
by the Thomson Reuters Article Influence Score. We explore this statistical
feature in the econometric analysis, which reveals the limited contribution to
awarded quality made by other publication attributes, possibly unobservable to
us, conditional on the Article Influence Score. We conclude that, in
large-scale and costly evaluations such as the REF, the time-consuming task of
peer reviews should be devoted to publications not in academic outlets with
unambiguously top-scoring bibliometric indicators of journal impact. Our model
also predicts a ranking of academic journals consistent with the
classification of REF panellists. |
| Keywords: |
education policy, higher education, journal ranking, research funding |
| JEL: |
H52 H52 H83 H83 I23 I23 I28 |
| Date: |
2017–12 |
| URL: |
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11198&r=sog |