Assessing publication performance of research units: extensions through operational research and economic techniques

Many quantitative measures exist to assess the publishing outputs of research units such as university departments or institutes. In addition to well-known issues with such measures, further shortcomings include inadequate adjustments for relative entity sizes and researcher intensity, the extent to which research is concentrated among a few rather than all researchers and lags between staffing and publication. This article presents a further array of possible measurement indices, based on operational research and economic ratios, which are capable of adjusting for each of these shortcomings, and which analysts can combine with relatively little effort into existing measures.