Department Rankings: an Alternative Approach

s International, American Doctoral Dissertations and Masters Abstracts International. Dissertations from 1861 to present are in the database. 7. The authors on whom we were unable to locate biographical data fall into four ma- jor categories: they are either from other dis- ciplines, from foreign universities, from non- academic institutions, or they have recently retired. The reason for the larger percentage of missing data on biographical information for the earlier twenty-year period is because during that time, fewer authors were members of the APSA and more of them appeared to be from outside the United States. 8. For example, we identified a total of sixty-three authors from DAO that received their Ph.D.'s in other disciplines. Our data also showed a total of 42 authors listed at non-academic institutions (e.g., Brookings In- stitution) in 1994 or 1973. 9. A school receives credit for a publica- tion when a faculty member publishes in the APSR, regardless of whether it was a single- authored or multi-authored article. Thus, if a team of four collaborators are all from the same school that school gets credit for four publications. 10. The equation for the Gini coefficient is, G = 1 + liN [2(XN + 2XN_ 1 + 3XN_2 + . . . + NX1)/N2J.L], where N equals the number of APSR authors in the department, XN is the highest number of APSR publications in a de- partment and Xl is the smallest, and J.L equals the mean number of APSR publications in the department. 11. The purpose here was to determine to what extent the APSR publications were uni- formly distributed across the authors who had contributed to the Review rather than deter- mining to what extent the articles were dis- tributed across all the members of each de- partment. If we included all members of each department who have no APSR publications, the coefficients would be much higher. The coefficient values are also surpressed by the fact that very few individuals in the profession publish five or more APSR articles. As a re- sult of how difficult it is to publish in the Re- view, few departments will ever have a highly skewed distribution for the number of APSR publications contributed by those who pub- lished at least once in the Review, hence Gini coefficients for the number of articles in the APSR should be relatively low. 12. The PVI is calculated by multiplying publications by citations and then dividing by 1,000. 13. It might be argued that the PVI, as we calculated it (number of APSR articles times the number of citations), is dominated by the weight of the citations. To examine this possi- bility we produced another ranking after set- ting publication counts equal to citation counts and adding the two numbers together. Setting publications equal to citations was ac- complished by dividing the mean number of citations by the mean number of publications, then multiplying the number of publications times the resulting number (185.64). The new ranking with equally weighted publication and citation counts is virtually the same as our original ranking, no doubt because number of publications and number of citations are cor- related. 14. The number of APSR articles for the faculty comes from Tables 3 and 4. The num- ber of articles produced by the graduates of a department comes from Table 5. To compute the number of citations used to calculate the PVI in Table 6, add the number of articles from Tables 3 (or 4 depending on the time period) and 5, then divide the PVI value in Table 6 (after multiplying by 1000) by the number of articles. For example, to calculate the combined number of citations for Har- vard, add 43 articles from Table 3 for 1994 and 44 articles from Table 5 for a total of 87 articles. Multiply the Table 6 PVI (3661.24) by 1000 and divide by 87 for a total of 42,083 citations. Interested readers can write the se- nior author to request these values and the PVI values for the fuller set of schools in- cluded in the data.