It was inevitable that this data would be used to create rankings of journals, departments, and even individual economists. These rankings have been sliced and diced by field, country, region, state, type of item, sex, graduation cohort, and even deceasedness. Below is the current ranking of university economics departments in Missouri:
| Rank | Department, University | Score |
| 1 | Dept of Economics, Washington Univ in St. Louis | 3.19 |
| 2 | Olin School of Business, Washington Univ in St. Louis | 4.16 |
| 3 | Economics Department, Univ of Missouri | 5.05 |
| 4 | Center for Economics & the Environment, Lindenwood Univ | 7.92 |
| 5 | Dept of Economics, Univ of Missouri-St. Louis | 10.92 |
| 6 | John Cook School of Business, St. Louis Univ | 13.72 |
Note that I have excluded the state's two Feds in Missouri because of the difficulty in figuring out who actually works in which division and because their lists of people include some who are just visiting scholars. Thus, their RePEc rankings are not terribly informative. Given that the two Feds account for a significant portion of the economics research done in the state, this is unfortunate.
In addition, RePEc's overall ranking methodology suffers from a severe case of information kitchen-sinkism. That is, the department rankings are determined by the harmonic average of 33 rankings, some of which are of questionable importance, and many of which are little more than minor variations of each other. Specifically, the 33 rankings include seven variations on the number of works, 12 variations on the number of citations, six variations on the number of pages, two variations on the number of citing authors, two variations for each of abstract views and downloads from the RePEc site, a measure of the success of graduate students, and the department H-index.
The rankings of individual economists are burdened by four additional sub-rankings: the closeness and betweenness measures of one's co-authorship network, the breadth of citations across fields, and the Wu-index. The its credit, the site allows you to choose criteria of your own, but you only get the world's top 5% for each.
In addition, RePEc's overall ranking methodology suffers from a severe case of information kitchen-sinkism. That is, the department rankings are determined by the harmonic average of 33 rankings, some of which are of questionable importance, and many of which are little more than minor variations of each other. Specifically, the 33 rankings include seven variations on the number of works, 12 variations on the number of citations, six variations on the number of pages, two variations on the number of citing authors, two variations for each of abstract views and downloads from the RePEc site, a measure of the success of graduate students, and the department H-index.
The rankings of individual economists are burdened by four additional sub-rankings: the closeness and betweenness measures of one's co-authorship network, the breadth of citations across fields, and the Wu-index. The its credit, the site allows you to choose criteria of your own, but you only get the world's top 5% for each.
I've created a more-useful ranking of Missouri's departments using individual economist's H-indices from the CitEc project, which contains RePEc's raw data on citations. The H-index is a simple and popular measure that is meant to capture both the quantity and impact of an author's body of work. From Wikipedia:
The definition of the index is that a scholar with an index of h has published h papers each of which has been cited in other papers at least h times.Note that I include each author's primary affiliation only, and, to fix inconsistencies in how authors chose their affiliation, each author was assigned to a specific department within a Fed or University. Here are the top 25% of research economists in Missouri according to their H-indexes:
| Rank | Name | Department | H-index |
| 1 | Anjan V. Thakor | Olin School of Business, Washington U | 31 |
| 2 | William A. Brock | Dept of Economics, U of Missouri | 30 |
| 3 | Robert A. Pollak | Olin School of Business, Washington U | 29 |
| 4 | Michele Boldrin | Dept of Economics, Washington U | 23 |
| 5 | Christopher Neely | Research Division, St Louis Fed | 22 |
| 6 | James Bullard | Research Division, St Louis Fed | 19 |
| 6 | Bruce Petersen | Dept of Economics, Washington U | 19 |
| 8 | Christopher Otrok | Dept of Economics, U of Missouri | 18 |
| 8 | Ping Wang | Dept of Economics, Washington U | 18 |
| 8 | Rodolfo E. Manuelli | Dept of Economics, Washington U | 18 |
| 8 | Goufu Zhou | Olin School of Business, Washington U | 18 |
| 12 | B Ravikumar | Research Division, St Louis Fed | 17 |
| 12 | Stephen Williamson | Research Division, St Louis Fed | 17 |
| 14 | Michael T. Owyang | Research Division, St Louis Fed | 16 |
| 14 | Steven Fazzari | Dept of Economics, Washington U | 16 |
| 14 | Philip H. Dybvig | Olin School of Business, Washington U | 16 |
| 17 | Howard Wall | Center for Econ & Environment, Lindenwood U | 15 |
| 17 | Christopher Waller | Research Division, St Louis Fed | 15 |
| 17 | David Wheelock | Research Division, St Louis Fed | 15 |
| 17 | Michael McCracken | Research Division, St Louis Fed | 15 |
| 21 | Ronald M. Harstad | Dept of Economics, U of Missouri | 14 |
| 22 | Costas Azariadis | Dept of Economics, Washington U | 13 |
| 22 | Marcus Berliant | Dept of Economics, Washington U | 13 |
| 22 | Jeroen Swinkels | Olin School of Business, Washington U | 13 |
| 25 | Jonathan Willis | Research Division, Kansas City Fed | 12 |
| 25 | Troy Davig | Research Division, Kansas City Fed | 12 |
| 25 | Rik Hafer | Center for Econ & Environment, Lindenwood U | 12 |
| 28 | Craig S. Hakkio | Research Division, Kansas City Fed | 11 |
| 28 | Don Schlagenhauf | Cent for Household Fin Stability, St Louis Fed | 11 |
| 28 | Bill Dupor | Research Division, St Louis Fed | 11 |
| 28 | Cletus C. Coughlin | Research Division, St Louis Fed | 11 |
| 28 | Jeffrey Milyo | Dept of Economics, U of Missouri | 11 |
| 28 | L. Randall Wray | Dept of Economics, UM-Kansas City | 11 |
| 28 | Werner Ploberger | Dept of Economics, Washington U | 11 |
| 35 | Jordan Rappaport | Research Division, Kansas City Fed | 10 |
| 35 | Richard Anderson | Center for Econ & Environment, Lindenwood U | 10 |
| 35 | David Andolfatto | Research Division, St Louis Fed | 10 |
| 35 | Yi Wen | Research Division, St Louis Fed | 10 |
| 35 | Barton Hamilton | Olin School of Business, Washington U | 10 |
| 35 | Glenn MacDonald | Olin School of Business, Washington U | 10 |
| 35 | Hong Liu | Olin School of Business, Washington U | 10 |
| 42 | George A. Kahn | Research Division, Kansas City Fed | 9 |
| 42 | Richard J. Sullivan | Research Division, Kansas City Fed | 9 |
| 42 | Carlos Garriga | Research Division, St Louis Fed | 9 |
| 42 | Christian Zimmermann | Research Division, St Louis Fed | 9 |
| 42 | S. Bandyopadhyay | Research Division, St Louis Fed | 9 |
| 42 | Michael Podgursky | Dept of Economics, U of Missouri | 9 |
| 42 | Selahattin Dibooglu | Dept of Economics, UM-St Louis | 9 |
| 42 | Norman Schofield | Dept of Economics, Washington U | 9 |
One way to obtain department rankings from individual rankings is to take an average of the H-index for the economists within a department. Doing so would give an upward bias to departments like mine, which is small and has a skewed distribution of H-indices (i.e., we skew old). So, instead, I also used the department H-index, which benefits large departments while also trimming the high end of the distribution. A department's score is then the sum of these two Hs relative to the maximum across departments. The result is ranking that includes the two Feds and the 11 departments in Missouri with at least 2 authors registered with RePEc:
| Rank | Department | Score |
| 1 | Olin School of Business, Washington U | 100 |
| 2 | Dept of Economics, Washington U | 92 |
| 3 | Research Division, St Louis Fed | 91 |
| 4 | Dept of Economics, U of Missouri | 76 |
| 5 | Center for Econ & the Environment, Lindenwood U | 62 |
| 6 | Research Division, Kansas City Fed | 55 |
| 7 | Center for Household Financial Stability, St Louis Fed | 53 |
| 8 | Dept of Economics, UM-St Louis | 47 |
| 9 | Dept of Ag and Applied Econ, U of Missouri | 34 |
| 10 | Dept of Economics, UM-Kansas City | 32 |
| 11 | Department of Economics, St Louis U | 29 |
| 12 | Bloch School of Business, UM-Kansas City | 27 |
| 13 | Dept of Econ and Finance, U of Central Missouri | 22 |
