Hirsch index and ranking of Czech economists

Abstract

The article contributes to the growing body of literature dealing with the bibliometric evaluation of the Czech economic research. In particular, this article introduces a recently invented measure of both the scientific output and impact – the Hirsch index (h) – into the Czech academic economics. While the theoretical part of the article contains a discussion of the strenghts and weaknesses of the Hirsch approach, the empirical part presents two original top50s of the Czech economists ranked by their individual h´s. The first of our charts comes from the Web of Science´s General Search dataset, and the second one reflects the use of the Web of Science´s Cited Reference Search dataset. Both datasets cover the 1980-2006 period. It appears that the rate of correspondence among the top 25 economists in each chart and the top25 of the celebrated Turnovec´s citation-based ranking (2005) amounts to 60%. In addition, our empirical results reveal that the elite Czech economists attain h´s being 3-10 times lower than the h´s of the foreign academic „superstars“.