This paper reviews a number of recent contributions that demonstrate that a blend of welfare economics and statistical analysis is useful in the evaluation of the citations received by scientific papers in the periodical literature. The paper begins by clarifying the role of citation analysis in...

This paper reviews the results of the literature on the ranking of centers of excellence in economics. There are two objectives: (1) to examine the evolution during the 1990s of certain features of economics research –such as the gap that exists between the U.S. and the rest of the world, the...

This paper contains the first empirical applications of a novel methodology for comparing the citation distributions of research units working in the same homogeneous field. The paper considers a situation in which the world citation distribution in 22 scientific fields is partitioned into three...