How Should Research Performance Be Measured? A Study of Swedish Economists

Abstract

Billions are allocated annually to university research. The increased specialization and international integration of research and researchers has animated the need for comparisons of performance across fields, institutions and individual researchers. However, there is still no consensus regarding how such rankings should be conducted and what output measures to use. We rank all full professors in a particular discipline (economics) in one country using seven established measures of research performance. We show both that the rank order varies greatly across measures and that the distribution of total research output is valued very differently depending on the measure used.