EUR professor heads the Economentop ranking

Daan van Knippenberg, Professor of Organizational Behavior at RSM, holds first place in the Economentop 40 2014. Indeed, EUR in general is well-represented in this year’s ranking. In addition to Van Knippenberg, the list includes eight other EUR economists.

The Economentop 40 is a yearly ranking of Dutch scholars in economics. Tilburg University remains the highest-scoring institution overall. Of the top 10 economists, no less than seven are employed by the Brabant university. A total of nine EUR researchers made this year’s list, compared to twelve included in those of the previous two years.

For this edition of Economentop, the Dutch magazine Economische Statistische Berichten (ESB) – responsible for compiling the ranking – made some major changes to the method used for calculating the economists’ scores. This has led to significant shifts in the ranking. While last year, five EUR scientists could be found in the top 10; on the 2014 list, their number has dwindled to Professor Van Knippenberg. In Economentop 2013, Van Knippenberg held fourth place. Remarkably, this year’s selection of forty ‘leading economists’ is a strictly male affair.

Method

Through the current change to its calculation method, ESB hopes to encourage scientists to invest more heavily in the quality of their publications rather than the number of articles published. Whereas last year’s list was still based on the economists’ articles, comments, letters, notes, meetings and conference contributions as published in the Web of Science database, this year, the scientists were represented by their 15 highest-scoring articles in the period 2009-2013. The publications’ individual scores are subsequently dependent on the number of contributing authors and the influence of the journal in question in the scientific community (Article Influence Score). EvR