The Relevance of the 'h-' and 'g-' Index to Economics in the Context of A Nation-Wide Research Evaluation Scheme: The New Zealand Case.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relevance of the citation-based 'h-' and 'g-' indexes as a means for measuring research output in economics. This study is unique in that it is the first to utilise the 'h-' and 'g-'indexes in the context of a time-limited evaluation period and to provide comprehensive coverage of all academic economists in all university-based economics departments within a nation state. For illustration purposes, we have selected the New Zealand's Performance-Based Research Fund ( PBRF) as our evaluation scheme. To provide a frame of reference for 'h-' and 'g-'index-output measures, we have also estimated research output using a number of journal-based weighting schemes. In general, our findings suggest that 'h-' and 'g-'index scores are strongly associated with low-powered journal ranking schemes and weakly associated with high powered journal weighting schemes. More specifically, we found the 'h-' and 'g-'indexes to suffer from a lack of differentiation: for example, 52 per cent of all participants received a score of zero under both measures, and 92 and 89 per cent received scores of two or less under 'h-' and 'g-' respectively. Overall, our findings suggest that 'h-' and 'g-'indexes should not be incorporated into a PBRF-like framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]