Rankings Upon Rankings: And No End in Sight Discussion of ‘Quantitative and Qualitative Rankings of Scholars’ by Rost and Frey

Abstract

Katja Rost and Bruno S. Frey address an important topic. They compare two kinds of rankings, a conventional allegedly "quantitative“ publication ranking, and a ranking based on the membership on editorial boards of academic journals, which they call "qualitative“. They find that the relation between the two rankings is not linear, but inversely u-shaped. Consequently, they argue that maximizing publication rankings may lead to a decline in research quality. Therefore, basing promotion decisions solely on publication rankings could be counterproductive for science and hence should be avoided.