The Relevance of the ‘h’ and ‘g’ Index to Economics in the Context of a Nation-wide Research Evaluation Scheme: The New Zealand Case

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relevance of the citation-based ‘h’ and ‘g’ indexes as a means for measuring research output in economics. This study is unique in that it is the first to utilize the ‘h’ and ‘g’ indexes in the context of a time limited evaluation period and to provide comprehensive coverage of all academic economists in all university-based economics departments within a nation state. For illustration purposes we have selected New Zealand’s Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) as our evaluation scheme. In order to provide a frame of reference for ‘h’ and ‘g’ index output measures, we have also estimated research output using a number of journal-based weighting schemes. In general, our findings suggest that ‘h’ and ‘g’ index scores are strongly associated with low-powered journal ranking schemes and weakly associated with high powered journal weighting schemes. More specifically, we found the ‘h’ and ‘g’ indexes to suffer from a lack of differentiation: for example, 52 percent of all participants received a score of zero under both measures, and 92 and 89 percent received scores of two or less under ‘h’ and ‘g’, respectively. Overall, our findings suggest that ‘h’ and ‘g’ indexes should not be incorporated into a PBRF-like framework.