Publication: The World Bank's Publication Record
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Date
2012-12
ISSN
1559-7431
Published
2012-12
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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. 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