Long-term university research rankings based on publications in the top five economics journals

Johnson, Mathew

Long-term university research rankings based on publications in the top five economics journals

Thesis / Dissertation

2026

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

School of Economics

Faculty

Faculty of Commerce

Abstract

Commercial university ranking systems have existed since the early 2000s, with multiple studies having been conducted using various metrics to rank universities over time. However, these studies are usually performed on merely a decade's worth of data at a time. This dissertation conducts long-term university rankings from 1940 to 2010, utilising the information provided from the top five economics journals identified in a publication by Combes and Linnemer (2010), and demonstrates how these metrics have evolved. A database of papers is created to perform this long-term ranking by downloading all the publications in the top five economics journals using a web scraper called Aaron's Kit (Chembezi, Oldnall & Van Zyl, 2021). The information from the papers is extracted from the PDFs using optical character recognition. Finally, the data is cleaned using fuzzy string matching and string replacements, with the remaining data points being filled in using Scopus and Amazon Mechanical Turk. To produce a ranking, a weighted count of authors and affiliations is applied. These rankings are presented over time to observe changes from 1940 to 2010. The rankings are then compared to similar studies that use more complex ranking methodologies, with the results yielded being very similar. This suggests that a more complex solution may not produce better ranking results. The top-ranked universities from this study are Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in that order. It is found that author collaboration on papers has increased from an average of 1.14 authors per paper in the 1940s to 1.98 authors per paper in the 2000s.