Aggregating faculty members’ research effectiveness to the department or university level: Exact versus approximate solutions

Abstract

Using the Benefit-of-the-Doubt (BoD) model, we estimate research effectiveness at the university level based on the research effectiveness scores of its faculty members with three different set of aggregation weights: an exact and two approximates. Our empirical results for the university of Macedonia, Greece indicate that both set of approximate weights tend to overestimate considerably the research effectiveness at the university level as the faculty level research effectiveness scores are highly positively correlated with both set of the approximate aggregation weights.