Publication: The World Bank's Publication Record
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Published
2012-12
ISSN
1559-7431
Date
2015-09-25
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Abstract
The World Bank claims to be a “knowledge bank,” but do its knowledge products influence development thinking, or is the Bank merely a proselytizer? The World Bank is a prolific publisher; for example, it has published more journal articles in economics than any university except Harvard. But what about their impact on development thinking? Using citation data from Google Scholar it is hard to discern more than a negligible impact for a great many Bank publications. However, a sizable minority of its journal articles and books have been highly cited. Compared to leading research universities and other international institutions, the Bank’s ranking in terms of widely-used citation-based indices is no lower than for its journal article counts. This suggests that the Bank’s research does much more than proselytize.
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Publication The World Bank’s Publication Record(2010-07-01)The World Bank has produced a huge volume of books and papers on development -- 20,000 publications spanning decades, but growing appreciably since 1990. This paper finds evidence that many of these publications have influenced development thinking, as indicated by the citations found using Google Scholar and in bibliographic data bases. However, the authors also find that a non-negligible share of the Bank's publications have received no citations, suggesting that they have had little scholarly influence, though they may well have had influence on non-academic audiences. Individually-authored journal articles have been the main channel for scholarly influence. The volume of the Bank's research output on development is greater than that of any of the comparator institutions identified, including other international agencies and the top universities in economics. The bibliometric indicators of the quality and influence of the Bank's portfolio of scholarly publications are on a par with, or better than, most of the top universities.Publication On Measuring Scientific Influence(2010-07-01)Bibliometric measures based on citations are widely used in assessing the scientific publication records of authors, institutions and journals. Yet currently favored measures lack a clear conceptual foundation and are known to have counter-intuitive properties. The authors propose a new approach that is grounded on a theoretical "influence function," representing explicit prior beliefs about how citations reflect influence. They provide conditions for robust qualitative comparisons of influence -- conditions that can be implemented using readily-available data. An example is provided using the economics publication records of selected universities and the World Bank.Publication An Evaluation of World Bank Research, 1998-2005(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-09-24)This evaluation of World Bank research between 1998 and 2005 was carried out by a panel consisting of Abhijit Banerjee (MIT), Angus Deaton (Princeton, chair), Nora Lustig (UNDP), and Kenneth Rogoff (Harvard.) The panel selected a large random sample of research projects, which were read and assessed by a team of 25 evaluators. Panel members also solicited views from current and past Bank staff, as well as from policy makers and academics in developing countries. Based on the evidence the authors assembled, the interviews the authors conducted, and their own consideration, the panel concluded that the World Bank needs a research department, and that its research needs cannot be fully met by hiring in from the outside. Research is a central part of quality control in the Bank, and is crucial to its claim to be 'Knowledge Bank.' Without a research-based ability to learn from its projects and policies, the Bank could not maintain its role as the world's leading development agency. The 2.5 percent of its administrative budget that the Bank spends on research is surely too low given the multiplicity of tasks that research is expected to fulfill, including the generation of new knowledge about development, the collection and dissemination of data, the generation of knowledge to support guide Bank strategy, operational support, and capacity building in client countries. As the world becomes richer, and already today among middle income countries, the need for high-quality, research-based advice will only become stronger as the need for Bank lending diminishes.Publication Knowledgeable Bankers? 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Staff working on poverty, human development and economic policy tend to value and use research more than staff in the more traditional sectors of Bank lending -- agriculture and rural development, energy and mining, transport and urban development; the latter sectors account for 45 percent of lending but only 15 percent of staff highly familiar with Bank research. Without stronger incentives for learning and more relevant and accessible research products, it appears likely that this lag in demand for research by the traditional sectors will persist.Publication Mashup Indices of Development(2010-09-01)Countries are increasingly being ranked by some new "mashup index of development," defined as a composite index for which existing theory and practice provides little or no guidance to its design. Thus the index has an unusually large number of moving parts, which the producer is essentially free to set. The parsimony of these indices is often appealing -- collapsing multiple dimensions into just one, yielding unambiguous country rankings, and possibly reducing concerns about measurement errors in the component series. But the meaning, interpretation and robustness of these indices are often unclear. If they are to be properly understood and used, more attention needs to be given to their conceptual foundations, the tradeoffs they embody, the contextual factors relevant to country performance, and the sensitivity of the implied rankings to changing the data and weights. In short, clearer warning signs are needed for users. But even then, nagging doubts remain about the value-added of mashup indices, and their policy relevance, relative to the "dashboard" alternative of monitoring the components separately. Future progress in devising useful new composite indices of development will require that theory catches up with measurement practice.
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