A Ranking We Like

7 January 2010 at 6:49 pm Peter Klein 14 comments

| Peter Klein |

An analysis published in the Eastern Economic Journal ranks O&M the sixth-best economics blog, based on the academic reputation of its authors. As you can see from Table 2, we outpaced such obscure sites as Freakonomics, DeLong’s blog, Marginal Revolution, and The Blog Formerly Known as the Austrian Economists. I wonder how we would fare against our good-twin site, were it included?

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14 Comments Add your own

1. Mark | 7 January 2010 at 9:43 pm

Congratulations — awesome! As reader of both twins, I think it’s fair to say you have the upper hand in a ranking of encomics blogs. In fairness, though, most folks think agree that Granny Smiths are nice apples, but not such great oranges.

Here’s to a full fruit basket for 2010!
2. Peter Boettke | 7 January 2010 at 10:11 pm

Peter,

I have a question .. can you explain Table 1 to me. To be myopically personal, I rank 30 but I have more than 1200 citations, but my citation count per year is in the 20s. Which would give me a professional age of 60+.

How does this work?

I actually blogged about this when it was still a working paper, but I haven’t had anyone successfully explain this citation program they are using (Publish or Perish).

Pete
3. Peter Klein | 7 January 2010 at 10:38 pm

Mark, thanks. I certainly favor letting a thousand fruits bloom, so to speak. But I think the ranking algorithm used in the paper can be applied to blogs from any academic discipline, so we could have that head-to-head twin-versus-twin battle we’ve all been dreaming about. (Assuming it’s reasonable to compare citation counts across disciplines, given possible variations in citation norms.)

Pete, sorry, I have no idea. But the procedure ranks me ahead of you, so whom am I to question it? :-)
4. David Hoopes | 7 January 2010 at 10:51 pm

Wow! Great work!

“Affiliated with Copenhagen Business School, Foss is the highest ranked economics blogger who is affiliated with a European university.”

Yikes.
5. David Gerard | 7 January 2010 at 11:09 pm

Perhaps the ranking is by height?

Congrats. O&M fellows.
6. congrats O&M « orgtheory.net | 8 January 2010 at 1:15 am

[...] a comment » First, congrats to O&M, our evil twin, for a fantastic showing in a recently published ranking of economics bloggers! Here’s the [...]
7. Peter Klein | 8 January 2010 at 12:52 pm

Pete B.: “Total citations per year” isn’t citations to a particular author divided by the author’s professional lifespan. The unit of analysis is the paper. The program takes each paper’s total cites, divides by the number of years that paper has existed, then sums this total across authors.
8. Lawrence H. White | 8 January 2010 at 2:28 pm

Peter K and Pete B: I found my own results puzzling for the same reason as Pete B. So I downloaded “Publish or Perish” (whichis easy) and looked into it. “Cites per year” as reported by PoP is indeed lifetime citations to the author divided by the author’s professional lifespan. Peter’s description applies instead to a reported metric called “Age Weighted Citation Rate”.

For Pete B’s citations, here’s what PoP reports:
Papers: 221 Cites/paper: 10.76
AWCR: 228.58Citations: 2377 Cites/author: 1735.81 g-index: 43 AW-index: 15.12
Years: 27 Papers/author: 157.17 hc-index: 14 AWCRpA: 159.10
Cites/year: 88.04 Authors/paper: 1.73
9. Lawrence H. White | 8 January 2010 at 2:36 pm

Sorry, that posted while I was still editing. Forgive the formatting.

If we take Pete B’s cites/year (88.04) and divide by Authors/paper (1.73), we get 50.9. How the EEJ authors got their number in the 20′s is unexplained. Likewise for my numbers, which imply a career of 48 years (versus PoP’s 34 years). The authors’ numbers imply a career of 50 years for Gary Becker, which is about right. So why Pete’s and my numbers don’t fit is a mystery.
10. Peter Klein | 8 January 2010 at 2:44 pm

Larry, thanks for the correction and clarification. Why doesn’t someone just ask the authors?
11. Lawrence H. White | 8 January 2010 at 2:56 pm

Asking the authors is a good idea. Mixon is one of my co-bloggers at DoL, so I’ll ask him.

In the meantime, here’s a possible clue. I earlier ran Boettke with the publication dates limited to 1977-present. Unlimited, here’s the output:

Papers: 222 Cites/paper: 11.30
AWCR: 232.06
Citations: 2509 Cites/author: 1779.81
Years: 38 Papers/author: 157.50 AWCRpA: 160.25
Cites/year: 66.03

Why did his years jump up? Because PoP counts all cites to Heyne, Boettke, et al., while regarding its publication date as 1973. So Pete’s lifetime cites go up, but his cites/year go down.

In my case, it takes a bit of work to remove the spurious “White LH” results, e.g. a paper by LH Summers and co-author named White. PoP begins my career with an undergrad term paper I wrote in 1976!
12. Lawrence H. White | 8 January 2010 at 2:58 pm

Correction: two different Mixons! You think I’d be sensitive to that sort of thing …
13. Peter Klein | 8 January 2010 at 2:59 pm

Right, I was going to say that you and Lawrence J. White combined must be pretty high in the ordering! (But, sadly, LJW doesn’t blog, to my knowledge.)
14. taking stock: four years of orgtheory « orgtheory.net | 21 April 2010 at 2:39 am

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