Friday, October 6, 2017

Impact Factors for Public Policy Schools

As part of our self-evaluation for the upcoming review of the Crawford School, I have been doing some bibliometric analysis. One thing I have come up with is calculating an impact factor for the School and some comparator institutions. This is easy to do in Scopus. It's the same idea as computing one for an individual or a journal, of course. I am using a 2016, 5 year impact factor. Just get total citations in 2016 to all articles and reviews published in 2011-2015. Divide by the number of articles. Here are the results with 95% confidence intervals:


The main difficulty I had was retrieving articles for some institutions such as the School of Public Affairs at Sciences Po. Very few articles came back for various variants of the name that I tried. I suspect that faculty are using departmental affiliations. I had a similar problem with IPA at LSE. So, I report the whole of LSE in the graph. It is easy to understand this metric in comparison to journal impact factors. As an individual metric the confidence interval will usually be large, though my 2016 impact factor was 5.9 with a 4.2 to 7.5 confidence interval. That's more precise than the estimate for SIPA.

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