@article{Oswald:271312, recid = {271312}, author = {Oswald, Andrew J.}, title = {World-Leading Research and its Measurement }, address = {2009-01-14}, number = {2068-2018-2608}, series = {WERP 887}, pages = {20}, month = {Jan}, year = {2009}, abstract = {Journalists and others have asked me whether the favourable RAE 2008 results for UK economics are believable. This is a fair question. It also opens up a broader and more important one: how can we design a bibliometric method to assess the quality (rather than merely quantity) of a nation’s science? To try to address this, I examine objective data on the world’s most influential economics articles. I find that the United Kingdom performed reasonably well over the 2001-2008 period. Of 450 genuinely world-leading journal articles, the UK produced 10% of them -- and was the source of the most-cited article in each of the Journal of Econometrics, the International Economic Review, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Rand Journal of Economics, and of the second most-cited article in the Journal of Health Economics. Interestingly, more than a quarter of these world-leading UK articles came from outside the best-known half-dozen departments. Thus the modern emphasis on ‘top’ departments and the idea that funding should be concentrated in a few places may be mistaken. Pluralism may help to foster iconoclastic ideas.}, url = {http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/271312}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.22004/ag.econ.271312}, }