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Am 5. September 2011 veröffentlichte das Handelsblatt das VWL-Ranking 2011. Der vorliegende Beitrag unterwirft die Methodik des Handelsblatts einer kurzen Kritik und vergleicht anschließend das Ranking mit demjenigen von RePEc.

In socio-economic sciences the RePEc network (Research Papers in Economics) has become an essential source for the gathering and the spread of both existing and new economic research. Furthermore, it is currently the largest bibliometric database in economic sciences containing 33 different indicators for more than 30,000 economists. Based on this bibliographic information RePEc calculates well-known rankings for authors and academic institutions. We provide some cautionary remarks concerning the interpretation of some provided bibliometric measures in RePEc. Moreover, we show how individual and aggregated rankings can be biased due to the employed ranking methodology. In order to select key in-dicators describing and assessing research performance of scientist, we propose to apply principal component analysis in this data-rich environment. This approach allows us to assign weights to each indicator prior to aggregation. We illustrate the approach by providing a new overall ranking of economists based on RePEc data.

In socio-economic sciences the RePEc network (Research Papers in Economics) has become an essential source both for the spread of existing and new economic research. Furthermore the calculation of rankings for authors and academic institutions play a central role. We provide some cautionary remarks on the ranking methodology employed by RePEc and show how the aggregated rankings maybe biased. Furthermore we offer anew ranking approach, based on standardization of scores, which allows interpersonal comparisons and is less sensitive to outliers. We illustrate our new approach with a large data set provided by RePEc based on 24,500 authors.

In diesem Beitrag wird das RePEc-Netzwerk vorgestellt, das speziell für den Bereich der Wirtschaftswissenschaften neben der Bereitstellung von Artikeln und bibliographischen Informationen auch verschiedene Rankings für Wissenschaftler und Institutionen berechnet.

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.