The Rise For Academic Integrity In Romanian (Domestic) Economic Sciences

Ioan-Sebastian Buhai, Gheorghe C. Silaghi, Florin O. Bilbiie, Andreea G. Halunga, Cristian M. Litan, Virgiliu Midrigan, Cristian Pop-Eleches, Zsolt Sandor, Marcel C. Voia
2016 Zenodo  
In Romania, a vast majority of academic economists do not meet basic international standards for research quality, while barriers to entry from outside have been at the same time enacted, by having in place domestic national criteria for evaluating scientific research that are completely out of touch with anything practiced in top 500 world-top universities, or in any other part of the civilized academe. Some of us already gave a preview of this parallel universe in Buhai, Litan and Silaghi
more » ... 5), where we showed that the current Romanian domestic criteria for evaluating scientific research and promoting academics within Economic Sciences are hallucinating, with consequences materialized in discouraging/ eliminating scientific value, and in the proliferation and promotion of scientific pseudo-science. Here, we extend and complement that earlier study, by showing that even the academics of global acclaim within the Economics profession, that is recent Nobel Laureates, John Bates Clark medal winners, or Yrjö Jahnsson awardees, would not qualify for Economics professorships in Romanian universities. When we consider the time those awardees first became full professors in their universities, one single individual passes current Romanian minimum qualification criteria for full professorship, Prof. Edmund Phelps; there are a few more who would minimally qualify at the time they received that award, but a majority of these world-top Economists could not pass even today. While the above finding should be reason for alarm already, we then explore this tragi-comic Romanian academic farce in more detail, looking also at other dimensions and consequences of current "research publishing" within Economic Sciences in Romania; for instance, we stress the multidisciplinary vocation of many of our domestic colleagues, who count among their numerous publications research in metallurgical, biological, medical, chemical, agronomical, and many other-science outle [...]
doi:10.5281/zenodo.1322736 fatcat:snxoj7ffozgpdjqrbwwqq6kebi