Research productivity in New Zealand university economics departments

Bairam (1996, 1997) reports rankings of seven New Zealand university economics departments in terms of their publications in certain refereed journals for the 1988-95 period. These rankings may not be reliable because a correction for the different page sizes of various journals was applied to only one quarter of the output of the New Zealand economists under study and little account was made of differences in the professional impacts of journals. These shortcomings in the methodology used by Bairam are shown to affect the ranking of departments, using evidence from publications in the 1996-98 period. This paper also discusses other potential refinements in the methodology used to rank the research productivity of New Zealand economics departments