Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
9-2009
Abstract
Against a background of the Irish government’s concerns with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and the British government’s wishes for a more quantitative Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), our study conducts a relative impact assessment of the study of politics, government, political science, and international relations in Ireland. Impact is measured as citations from the publications of permanent staff in eight Irish politics departments, based on data compiled in April 2008 from two leading academic indexes – ISI’s Web of Science and Scopus – as well as the now popular Google Scholar. We discuss some of the criticisms that naturally arise in a study of this nature. Then, following similar exercises in other disciplines (e.g. economics), we use the impact measures to compare and rank individual scholars as well as departments. We also explore the extent to which the choice of different indexes, and different measures, influences the results that we obtain. While there are differences, in particular between indexes based purely on articles and those that access books and other material, the results from the different indexes are strongly correlated.
Discipline
Political Science | Scholarly Publishing
Research Areas
Political Science
Publication
Economic and Social Review
Volume
40
Issue
3
First Page
269
Last Page
298
ISSN
0012-9984
Citation
BENOIT, Kenneth, & MARSH, Michael.(2009). A relative impact ranking of political studies In Ireland. Economic and Social Review, 40(3), 269-298.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/4012
Copyright Owner and License
Publisher
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.