In socio-economic sciences the RePEc network (Research Papers in Economics) has become an essential source both for the spread of existing and new economic research. Furthermore the calculation of rankings for authors and academic institutions play a central role. We provide some cautionary...

In socio-economic sciences the RePEc network (Research Papers in Economics) has become an essential source for the gathering and the spread of both existing and new economic research. Furthermore, it is currently the largest bibliometric database in economic sciences containing 33 different...

It is well-known that the distribution of citations to articles in a journal is skewed. We ask whether journal rankings based on the impact factor are robust with respect to this fact. We exclude the most cited paper, the top 5 and 10 cited papers for 100 economics journals and recalculate the...

We introduce archetypal analysis as a tool to describe and categorize scientists. This approach identifies typical characteristics of extreme ('archetypal') values in a multivariate data set. These positive or negative contextual attributes can be allocated to each scientists under...

This paper compares the German Gross Domestic Product between 1991 and 2008 with the Ifo business indicators. Because GDP is published quarterly but the Ifo indicators monthly, the most analyses compare these variables by merging the indicators to quarterly data. In this paper an alternative way...

It is well-known that nonresponse affects the results of surveys and can even cause bias due to selectivities if it cannot be regarded as missing at random. In contrast to household surveys, response behaviour in business surveys has been examined rarely in the literature. This paper is one of...

With the world-wide spread of the internet in the 1990s, the conduction of web or e-mail surveys became popular in research. Although these surveys provide fast data collection and reduced costs, results may suffer from biases due to the survey mode. While a variety of studies concerning mode...

Surveys are a widely used tool to answer socio-economic research question across disciplines. However, data collection can face certain problems such as nonresponding units. For household and population surveys, a large body of literature about the effects of nonresponse exist but only less is...