~31 times.
citation: http://tinyurl.com/mankiwranking
via www.env-econ.net
Thanks to Mike@pvl for determining that 31 is the number of times Greg Mankiw's blog has pointed to the RePEc rankings (including the top 5% economist rankings at RePEc in which Mankiw is ranked highly) ("ryan" states that robert engle's blog has linked to it 31-2 times, I need to check that out). That's a lot. Maybe obsessively high.
Saturday Morning Update: After thinking about this some, shouldn't economists prefer a market based ranking system to figure out who the top economists are? Add up all the income and the biggest millionaire is the top economist. In this system, where base salary is peanuts, I imagine that Mankiw wins. Royalties from the top selling intro textbook are hard to beat by large consulting fees.
Another update: I checked out that link and they are not all to the top economist rankings, nor are there 31. While I still think that Greg Mankiw's blog links to RePEc citations rankings excessive (downgraded from obsessively), I apologize for the overstatement.
Here are the 6 backlinks to http://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.nbcites.html that I could find on Mankiw's blog using a Google blog search of link:http://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.nbcites.html.
On Steve Levitt:
It is noteworthy that while Steve's work is highly respected (he won a Clark medal), it is not particularly highly cited for someone of his stature. The citation leaders tend to address the big questions, and that fact should help focus the attention of the next generation of economists.
Suggesting that counting citations is a mistake:
In Current Biology, a zoologist says it is misguided to evaluate scientists by counting their citations. Fortunately, we economists would never make that mistake.
On the Nobel Prize in economics:
Based on citations, who is in line to get the prize? In that old ranking, the top two on the list who have not yet won the prize are Fama and Feldstein. In this somewhat more recent citation ranking, the top two economists are Fama and Barro. In this most recent ranking, the top two are Barro and Shleifer.
On ranking economics departments:
In a previous post, I offered some advice for those lucky duckies who were admitted to PhD programs in economics at both Harvard and MIT. I noted that if you use the standard REPEC ranking and look at the top 50 economists, you will learn that MIT has 3 and Harvard has 12.
Another Nobel Prize post:
And this one:FYI, here is an up-to-date citation ranking of more than 20,000 economists.
Unfortunately, that does not add to my cite count.
However, this search doesn't include all of them (and I don't know why). For example, Mankiw's blog links to it again in the "previous post" link above and the most recent one that set me off.
Here are a few that link to this version of the ranking (http://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.all.html): one, two, three, four, five, six.
Most all of us are obsessed with recognition and our place in the world (e.g., rankings). The trick is to keep the lid on it whenever you can.
A question for my readers: do I have better things to do with my time than to poke the lion with a stick?
