Ranking Economics Departments in a Contested Discipline: A Bibliometric Approach to Quality Equality Between Theoretically Distinct Subdisciplines

A bstract Quality ranking of economic journals and departments is a widespread practice in the United States. The methods used are peer review and bibliometric measures. In a divided discipline such as economics scientific knowledge is contested. So knowing which journals and departments are the best in terms of research is somewhat muddied. If the methods used to measure the production of quality scientific knowledge are tilted towards one of the contested approaches, the resulting quality rankings of journals and departments are tilted as well. So if the objective is the open‐minded pursuit of the production of scientific knowledge, then it is important to have measures of quality that treat the different contested approaches equally. Our article explores this issue by examining the impact that a quality‐equality bibliometric measure can have on the quality rankings of doctoral economic programs in the United States.