Abstract
This study gathers information on a wide array of economics bloggers and blogs in order to develop a ranking of economics bloggers that is based on citations to their academic research. This ranking is used in an iterative process that next presents a ranking of economics blogs that is based on the ranking of economics bloggers, and finally a ranking of economics departments that is based on the ranking of economics blogs. The ranking of blogs included in this study is positively correlated with an external ranking based on their productivity (popularity), whereas the department ranking presented here comports quite well with department rankings in Coupé (2003) and Roessler (2004) that are developed with more traditional measures, such as the impact of the scholarship of an economics department's faculty.
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Notes
A “blog” is a contraction of the term “weblog” (which, itself, is often considered to be a contraction of the terms “web log”), which is a type of Internet website that is maintained by an individual or individuals with regular entries of commentary on a particular subject or subjects (wikipedia.org). Entries are usually presented in reverse chronological order, and the act of maintaining a blog is known, in verb form, as “blogging” (wikipedia.org).
Information on the blog's hosts was often found using the “About” tab at the blog's home. The blog's contributors were most often found by scrolling through several pages of the blog itself.
The Harzing database [Mingers and Harzing 2007; Harzing and van der Wal 2008] includes citations data to authors, articles and journals that are retrieved from Google Scholar and analyzed by Harzing's “Publish or Perish” software engine in order to ascertain the scientific impact of those authors, articles, and journals. The Harzing program is an open access program that can be downloaded at www.harzing.com. In terms of functionality, it works much like Google Scholar, except that citations and citations evaluation metrics are provided by the Harzing program. A more thorough description of the Harzing database/engine is found at www.harzing.com.
Dubner is ranked 32nd among economics bloggers. His writings garner 20.3 citations per year.
We thank an anonymous referee for helping us shape these ideas.
The Gongol.com average daily page views (ADPV) data are updated on a monthly basis. This study employs data from early July through early August of 2009. The overlapping ADPV are presented alongside their SIS counterparts in Table 2.
Studies that rank economics departments and/or economists are usually limited in one way or another (see Mixon and Upadhyaya [2001] for some discussion). The same holds for the current study, which includes economics departments (e.g., University of Kansas) whose rankings may be based on the blogging efforts of a single member.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank three anonymous referees for providing helpful comments. Any remaining errors are our own.
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Mixon, F., Upadhyaya, K. Blogometrics. Eastern Econ J 36, 1–10 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/eej.2009.46
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/eej.2009.46