NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

How Does the Market Use Citation Data? The Hirsch Index in Economics

Glenn Ellison

NBER Working Paper No. 16419
Issued in September 2010
NBER Program(s):   ED   PR

A large literature following Hirsch (2005) has proposed citation-based indexes that could be used to rank academics. This paper examines how well several such indexes match labor market outcomes using data on the citation records of young tenured economists at 25 U.S. departments. Variants of Hirsch's index that emphasize smaller numbers of highly-cited papers perform better than Hirsch's original index and have substantial power to explain which economists are tenured at which departments. Adjustment factors for differences across fields and years of experience are presented.

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