The 'rising stars' of economics education (and yes, it includes me!)

I've been meaning to post about this working paper by Wayne Geerling, Dirk Mateer (both University of Texas at Austin), and Jadrian Wooten (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) for a while (it was highlighted in a 'this week in research' post back in November, and I read it then). The paper analyses citation data from articles on economics education published in economics journals between 2019 and 2023. It then ranks authors based on citation counts and i10-index (the number of published articles with ten or more citations).

The top 50 authors are shown in Table 1 in the paper. The top four will not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the literature: William Walstad, Sam Allgood, William Becker, and KimMarie McGoldrick. However, if you scroll a little further down the list, there I am, ranked at #27, with 161 citations and an i10-index of three. And if you look carefully at the list, you'll see that almost all of the names above me are from US institutions. So, I am ranked #5 among non-US-based economics education authors! Sadly, I don't make it onto the list of the top authors based on i10-index, which they cut off at four. However, this is still welcome recognition of my research on economics education.

However, it is worth noting that my performance is almost entirely driven by this one article (ungated earlier version here). That article on financial literacy among high school students was co-authored with Richard Calderwood, Ashleigh Cox, Steven Lim, and Michio Yamaoka, all of whom also make it onto the authors list in joint 30th place, with the majority of their 145 citations coming from that one article, which has 118 (the rest of their citations will be from this other article (ungated) co-authored with me, from the same project). The article on financial literacy among high school students is actually the fifth most cited in the whole sample used by Geerling et al.

I have a number of economics education projects on the go. Most of them involve data drawn from my ECONS101 classes, where I am always trying (and evaluating) something new. This trimester. we've been trialling the use of a generative AI tutor, Harriet, which I posted about at the start of the year. We've also given students the opportunity to do practice multiple choice questions every day ('Question of the Day') on Moodle. Both of those initiatives will be evaluated in terms of their contribution to student performance in assessment. However, even having done the evaluation, that doesn't guarantee that I find the time to write the analysis up as a paper. But if I want to retain my ranking in Geerling et al.'s list, then I will have to make a more concerted effort to get my economics education research published!

[HT: Wayne Geerling]