Research: Are We Valuing the Right Stuff?

The incentives researchers face depend directly upon what we as a profession value. The impacts of research can be either disciplinary by adding to economic knowledge or real world by being useful to economic agents. Various measures of research impact such as publications, citations, and external funding are discussed, and the strengths and weaknesses of each measure are evaluated. Because of the difficulty of accurately measuring research impact, we must depend on internal incentives to motivate researchers to select topics with the most potential impact.