Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/238317 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 106
Publisher: 
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza (DISCE), Milano
Abstract: 
We use the UK's 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) to study the attributes of top-scoring (four-star) publications in Economics and Econometrics. Although official documents contain aggregate scores for each institution, we show how these aggregates can be used to infer the score awarded by REF panellists to each publication. We demonstrate that this score responds to journal prestige as measured by the Thomson Reuters Article Influence Score. Several econometric analyses confirm the limited contribution of other publication attributes, such as the citation counts, to the awarded score, and publications in the top generalist and top-five economics journals are unambiguously awarded four stars. We conclude that in large-scale evaluations such as the REF, peer reviews and bibliometrics should be viewed as complementary modes of assessment: the time-consuming task of peer reviews would be more costeffective if targeted to publications whose quality cannot be unambiguously classified using bibliometrics.
Subjects: 
Education Policy
Higher Education
Journal Ranking
Research Funding
JEL: 
H52
H83
I23
I28
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.