The Productivity of Economics Research in Slovakia

Abstract

The research productivity of economics departments and tenure-track staff (associate and full professors) in Slovakia is analyzed based on journal publications and citations extracted from the SSCI database. Results suggest that the current university system in Slovakia is ineffective in incentivizing associate and full professors to publish in peer-reviewed journals. The majority of tenure-track staff has done little or no research over the past twenty-six years. The research criteria imposed by the Accreditation Commission for awarding professors’ titles are not fully enforced. Economics faculties have low-quality standards in hiring tenure-track staff. Finally, results suggest that the majority of tenure-track staff (93%) do not have sufficient research skills to supervise Ph.D. students.

Keywords:

• associate/full professors
• citations
• economics departments
• journal publications
• rankings
• research productivity

JEL Classification:

• A11
• P2

Notes

1. This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under Grant No. APVV-16-0321. The authors are solely responsible for the content of the article. The views expressed are purely those of the authors and may not under any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the European Commission.

2. An alternative method for valuation of journal quality is based on expert judgment. The disadvantage of this approach is that it can be subjective and represent the personal bias of the experts (Peters et al. 2014; So 1998).

3. According to Kodrzycki and Yu (2012) and Palacios-Huerta and Volij (2004), the article rather than the paper-page is more meaningful, because the former is the natural unit for measuring research output, whereas paper length is heavily influenced by journal editorial policies.

4. Under the Slovak university system, a faculty is a division within a university, which consists of a number of departments and conducts teaching and research in one field, or a number of related fields. Only economics faculties are considered in this article.

5. The fourteen economics faculties considered in the article are at the following ten universities: College of International Business (ISM), Comenius University in Bratislava (UK), J. Selye University (UJS), Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica (UMB), Paneuropean University (PEVŠ), Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra (SPU), Technical University of Košice (TUKE), University of Economics in Bratislava (EUBA), University of Prešov (PU), and University of Žilina (ŽU) (see Appendix Table 1A).

6. One could recover this information with the flow approach if the list of all employed staff at economics departments is collected over the whole study period, which, however, is unavailable.

7. Note that the data were collected during October and December 2016, which implies that only those publications were considered for 2016 which were registered in the database at the time of collection.

8. Note that this approach is a less restrictive approach than the one used in other articles, in which economics departments’ publication productivity is often quantified based only on selected economics journals. For example, Graves, Marchand, and Thompson (1982), Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos (2003), and McPherson (2012) consider only the top twenty-four, thirty, and fifty economics journals, in ranking of economics departments in the United States, worldwide, and United States, respectively.

9. Journals in the following fields are considered here as economics journals: economics; business; finance and business; operations research and management science; and agricultural economics, policy, and management.

10. If IF is not available for the period 2013–2015, the last three available years were used. Note that some journals may not have an IF since the start date of the sample, but their articles might have been registered in the SSCI database. For example, Finance a Úvěr received an IF in 2000, but its articles were registered in the SSCI database prior to this date. Articles published in Ekonomicky Casopis and Politická Ekonomie were registered in the SSCI database prior to the start date of the sample. Unfortunately, consistent data were lacking to account for the date when the journals analyzed received an IF. For this reason, this factor cannot be considered. All articles registered in the SSCI database published in a journal with an IF in 2013–2015 (or the last three available years for discontinued journals) were included in this article.

11. Note that both total and per capita indicators are calculated as relative values compared to the department with the highest value of the respective indicator in order to ensure the same unit of the two indicators is used when the department’s total publication score is calculated.

12. A similar approach is used by Bauwens (1998) and Pomfret and Wang (2003), who also exclude domestic journals to construct a ranking of economics universities and economists in Belgium and Australia, respectively. Also excluded are Czech journals, because of the common past history of the two countries and the existence of strong relations between Slovak and Czech universities in many areas, including journal editorial boards.

13. According to the minimum criteria set by the Accreditation Commission, among others, a researcher needs to have at least fifteen (thirty) citations to be eligible to receive an associate (full) professorship, of which one-third need to be listed in the Web of Science or Scopus databases (AK 2013a; Law No. 131 2002).

14. Note that SAV does not have departments; hence, it is not included in this figure.

15. Note that Guimaraes (2002) and Mata (1995) use the flow approach; hence, they evaluate the performance of active researchers. Researchers with zero publications are not accounted for in their data; hence, one cannot provide an overall distribution of publication performance based on their analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency [APVV-16-0321].

Notes on contributors

Pavel Ciaian

Pavel Ciaian is a Team Leader in the Economics of Agriculture Unit at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. Drahoslav Lancaric is a Senior Researcher on the Faculty of Economics and Management at the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra. Jan Pokrivcak is Professor and Head of the Department of Economic Policy on the Faculty of Economics and Management at the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra.