Ranking Romanian academic departments in three fields of study using the g-index

Abstract

The scientific performance of 64 political science, sociology and marketing departments in Romania is investigated with the aid of the g-index. The assessment of departments based on the g-index shows, within each of the three types of departments that make up the population of the study, a strong polarisation between top performers (very few) and weak performers (much more numerous). This alternative assessment is also found to be largely consistent with an official ranking of departments carried out in 2011 by the Ministry of Education. To conduct the evaluation of departments the individual scientific output of 1385 staff members working in the fields of political science, sociology and marketing is first determined with the aid of the ‘Publish or Perish’ software based on the Google Scholar database. Distinct department rankings are then created within each field using a successive (second-order) g-index.

Keywords:

• research evaluation
• g-index
• department rankings
• university classification
• quality

Acknowledgements

Financial support from the National Research Council is gratefully acknowledged by Adrian Miroiu. The authors are also grateful to two anonymous referees for valuable suggestions that helped to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Council [grant number PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0746].