In economics, that is. A new paper by Daniel Hamermesh and Gerard Pfann tries to answer that question. Their abstract is worded a little awkwardly, I would summarize their results as follows:
1. Adjusting for citations and other measures, "reputation" (defined both in terms of awards and the quality of the department you inhabit), does not rise with the quantity of articles published by an individual.
2. Adjusting for citations and other variables, having your citations in a single dominant piece, rather than scattered across a greater number of pieces, does not predict reputation.
3. The quantity of articles published does predict mobility and salary (adjusting for quality), even though it does not predict reputation.
I take the lesson to be that lots of schools — non-top departments — want to hire churners with a lot of published output. I'm a little worried about which quality measures should be predicting which in this paper, but nonetheless the results rang true to my ear. The paper (NBER) is here. Angus also comments.
“Peer review is broken and needs an advocate: a continuing series”?
I think your title should have been “Some things that do not determine a professors reputation.”
Whatever it may be that does determine an economics professor’s reputation, it appears to be something rather different than the corresponding measures in science.
I do not know bu let’s try to explain Prof. Buiter appointment at Citigroup as Chief Economist
How to reconcile Plutonomy and good banks in Citigroup?
http://mgiannini.blogspot.com/2009/11/plutonomy-and-good-bank-for-citigroup.html.
Oh dear, is this what research has come to? The nitty-gritty at last. For shame!
Reputation measure here is a crude proxy for what elite departments think of as “good” professors. That’s the real currency of the profession. Publications will fool deans but elite schools want people “worthy” of their ranks. All others are to be shut out no matter how many pubs in how many top journals.
Anyone in a top 25 department has seen people on the market with scores of good pubs with NO chance of being hired by top places. Conversely, the right sort of insider can get promoted at a top school with half a dozen papers.
I think that results are more concrete in physics, astronomy, biology, chemistry, and medicine. It’s usually pretty straightforward to test and confirm (or not) important predictions. In economics it seems that the most fundamental principles are still up for grabs.
The current situation with string theory is an important exception to the above. The most cited physicist, and the one generally considered the brightest (Ed Witten) has few if any results confirmed by experiment. His reputation rest mainly on his mathematics (where he has great results) and on string theory – popular, controversial, and possibly untestable.
According to wikipedia, “According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Noam Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar during the 1980–92 period, and was the eighth most-cited source.” Yet I rarely hear him referred to in blogs or the media.
For what should determine it, see
http:/www.econotrashtalk.org/The Purest Amateur.htm
See
http://econotrashtalk.org/#A_Declaration_of_Economics
I gree with it!
Ok, that is really strange. That is my opinion.
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