series. The _World Development Reports_ rank fifth among the Bank book series, with 46 citations per report. However, some of the Bank’s flagship publications are largely invisible in Google Scholar, although they are more prominent in Google News.

7. Journal articles by Bank-affiliated authors have clearly had more overall scholarly influence than books, though we do not measure influence on other non-scholarly audiences, including policy makers. A number of journal articles have been cited more than any book volume; for example, over 300 journal articles by Bank authors have been cited more than the most cited WDR.

8. We find that 5,500 Bank publications have never been cited in the vast array of documents covered by Google Scholar. Journal articles and working papers have been cited more in the scholarly literature than books. For example, only 15% of working papers fail to get a single citation; the figure for journal articles is higher at 22%. Nearly 50% of book chapters have never been cited.

9. The Bank compares favorably to the 14 comparator universities in the percentage of cited journal articles: only one university has a lower share of un-cited work. In terms of mean Google Scholar citations per article among articles indexed in the SCOPUS database, the Bank ranks sixth behind Berkeley, Chicago, MIT, Princeton and Stanford. The SCOPUS database contains 192 Bankauthored articles that have been cited at least 192 times—giving an “h-index” of 192; only Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard and Stanford have higher h-indexes. The Bank ranks first among the top 14 universities in the h-index for articles published in development economics journals.

10. Similar results emerge from comparisons with the same institutions using the RePEc data. The Bank ranks first on number of works and journal pages, and also ranks first on downloads and abstract views. On total citations the Bank ranks third. On RePEc’s overall index (a harmonic mean of 31 indicators), the Bank ranks 3<sup>rd</sup> , and ranks first within the development field.

11. The Bank’s research department accounts for one third of the Bank’s publications; 45% of working papers, 36% of journal articles and 33% of book chapters. Research department staff account for just 11% of the Bank’s book catalogue, and hardly ever produce an edited volume. Non-citation rates are lower and citation rates higher among publications authored by research staff. This is true of books and book chapters, as well as the publication types favored by research staff (journal articles and working papers).

# **How much does the Bank publish, where, and on what?**

Surprisingly perhaps, there is currently no World Bank database that collects even summary data on all the publications of Bank staff. We therefore created as comprehensive a database as we could for the purpose of this paper. We began with the Elsevier-owned SCOPUS database, which covers a larger set of journals than SSCI and also includes various non-journal publications. We searched for publications where the World Bank was listed as the author’s affiliation, finding 5,753 publications.<sup>3</sup> The bulk of these (5,371) were journal articles, 113 were conference proceedings, and the remaining 134 were a mix of North-Holland Handbook chapters (14), technical and working papers (mostly) from Bank series other than the Bank’s Policy

> 3  Despite efforts to eliminate duplicates at each stage, we discovered some at the end of the construction of the dataset. The figures quoted here are after their deletion.

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