Ranking economics departments in the US South: an update

ABSTRACT

This study provides an update to Mixon and Upadhyaya’s (2001) ranking of Southern economics departments using research output indexed in EconLit. Ranking results from a ‘core’ (i.e. the top five faculty researchers) of each institution’s economics department reveal that Vanderbilt University, George Mason University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland and Georgia State University currently maintain the top five economics departments, respectively, in the US South. Relatedly, the five institutions rising the most from Mixon and Upadhyaya (2001) are Tulane University, Georgia State University, University of Texas–Dallas, Rice University and Florida International University, respectively.

KEYWORDS:

• Economics department rankings
• faculty publications
• sociology of economics
• scientometrics

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• A14
• A10

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The former approach has historically employed citations data from the Web of Science (formerly referred to as the Social Sciences Citation Index). More recently, however, citations data obtained from Google Scholar have also become a popular basis for measuring academic productivity. See Mixon and Upadhyaya (2001) for discussion of the pros and cons of each approach.

² Following Mixon and Upadhyaya (2001), the states comprising the US South include Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia.

³ The set of institutions examined here contains 19 more colleges and universities than the 69 considered in Mixon and Upadhyaya (2001). This increase is the result of US News & World Report’s reclassification of a number of colleges and universities that were classified as ‘regional’ institutions by the periodical in 1998.

⁴ Mixon and Upadhyaya (2001) examine the research productivity of the American Economic Association (AEA) members of each institution. That approach, which made use of the American Economic Association Survey of Members publication from December 1997, was borne mainly of necessity given that the Internet was not as widely used then as it is today. Of course, the existence of departmental webpages provides us with easy access to the names of the faculty members in each of the 88 economics departments in the US South.

⁵ For economics departments with fewer than five faculty, the EconLit scores of the existing faculty are summed and then divided by 5 for a top-five mean score.

⁶ The University of New Orleans, which ranked twentieth in studies by Gerrity and McKenzie (1978) and Niemi (1975), occupies the sixty-sixth position in the current study. That position is, however, nine spots higher than its ranking in Mixon and Upadhyaya (2001). The remaining departments – the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University – occupy spots (i.e. 45 and 43, respectively) similar to the ones they held in Mixon and Upadhyaya (2001).

⁷ Informal analysis of the top five suggests that the mix of junior professors is less relevant than is the mix of overall faculty. For instance, junior faculty at both Vanderbilt University and Johns Hopkins University consist mainly of assistant professors, while those at George Mason University, the University of Maryland and Georgia State University are largely associate professors.

⁸ Interestingly, just under 50%of the faculty in each of these two departments are senior scholars (i.e. full professors).

⁹ See http://renewal.tulane.edu/background.shtml. Examination of the top producers at Tulane University reveals that its ascension from Mixon and Upadhyaya (2001) is largely the result of the post-2009 hiring of a few senior scholars, mixed with the successes of both junior and senior faculty hired by Tulane before Hurricane Katrina.

¹⁰ Examination of the top producers at Georgia State University reveals that its economics department’s relatively recent acquisition of a number of senior scholars played a large role in its relative ascension among Southern economics departments. Junior professors play a substantial role in the University of Texas–Dallas’ success, which is also largely the result of recent job market acquisitions. Lastly, as in the case of Georgia State University, senior scholars played a relatively large role in Rice University’s rise. Unlike the Georgia State University case, however, Rice University’s success has been achieved through more of a mix of earlier-generation entry-level hiring and the recent acquisition of noteworthy senior scholars.

¹¹ Florida International University is ranked 44 in Mixon and Upadhyaya (2001).