Evaluation of Researchers: A Life Cycle Analysis of German Academic Economists

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. In this paper we ague that any meaningful bibliometric evaluation of researchers needs to take into account that research productivity follows distinct life cycles. Using an encompassing data set portraying the research behavior of German academic economists, we first show that research productivity crucially depends on career age and vintage. Based on the identified effects, we develop a simple formula that shows how a researcher's performance compares to that of his or her peers. This kind of information may serve as an input for performancerelated remuneration and track-record based allocation of research grants. We then go on to investigate the persistence of individual productivity. The Persistence issue is of special importance in the academic labor market because of the irrevocable nature of tenure. Finally, we show how life cycle considerations can be used in evaluations of university departments in order to render the resulting rankings insensitive to the age structure of the evaluated faculties. Terms of use: Documents inJEL Code: A11, A14, J24, J41, M51.

Life Cycle and Cohort Productivity in Economic Research: The Case of Germany

“…This evidence supports the following interpretation: 16. In Rauber and Ursprung (2008), we have identified the same pattern of cohort-specific life cycles by including cohort-specific career-time polynomials in a standard Tobit regression, and in the working paper version of this article (Rauber and Ursprung, 2007), we also consider fixed effects that are specific to the individual economist by using a quantile estimator due to Honoré (1992). The estimated career-time polynomial compares well with the pooled quantile estimates presented in Figure 3.…”

Research evaluation and journal quality weights

“…This author would, for example, not be surprised if the clever faculty members of the Vienna University of Economics and Business substituted away from the real heavy-weight journals in the A+ and the A class in the WU-JournalRating and tried to garner their EUR 3000 and EUR 1000 bonuses with easier assignments; "Gresham's law of research" will see to it that "mediocre research drives good research out of circulation" (cf. Rauber and Ursprung 2008a). Ritzberger's journal classification has a different focus than the other journal-quality weighting schemes analyzed in this study.…”

The impact of new public management instruments on PhD education

“…One common measure is the publication record of PhD graduates (Hilmer and Hilmer 2007) or professors (Rauber and Ursprung 2008), but the total number of graduates (Leszczensky and Orr 2004) or the reputation of a graduate school (Ehrenberg 2004;Burris 2004) also serve as indicators for success. Yet these criteria suffer from pitfalls.…”