The Rise for Academic Integrity in Romanian (Domestic) Economic Sciences
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 (2015), 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 outlets—all of the same quality as those
Economics publications they produce. We continue by investigating more generally how the qualityweighted domestic Economics research compare to the rest of the world and find, to hopefully the great
surprise of many readers, that Romania fares worse than Uganda, Nigeria, Trinidad-Tobago, Ghana, Sri
Lanka, or Cameroon—in fact the African average is twice higher than Romania’s when using the ISI inCites
ranking of world regions, based on the Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI). Very similar
conclusions are obtained also by using the Scimago country rank, that uses the h-index, for either within
Economics & related or the Business & related, categories. Romania proves to be an outrageous outlier in the
European Union in terms of quality of the research produced within Economic Sciences, where almost
everything published, in huge quantities, has no scientific quality and is not read or cited by anyone.
Given that the national criteria in place have been decided by individuals who themselves fail any
international scientific standards, and that those people have a direct or indirect influence over any new
criteria to be set in the future, this cycle is likely to perpetuate if not for an external intervention. We thus call
on the international academic community to closely monitor the current dismal state of affairs, and any new
developments- or lack of development- in the Economics academe in Romania, at the same time encouraging
our colleagues inside Romania to stand up and fight for academic integrity, dignity, and honor. We also
bring attention to some important concrete developments in the very near future (as of now, tomorrow, the
5th of December), involving the current national Committee for Economic Sciences (CNATDCU-ECON);
that meeting and debate might, and hopefully will, help with the current situation even if marginally, by
changing the current national criteria in place. It would be just an epsilon step, but still a step forward, that
would interrupt the regression until now, accelerated recently. We end with reasons for hope: at the ERMAS
conferences, which some of us initiated, and elsewhere, we have met many Romanian domestic economists,
of different ages, institutions, research interests, who are capable, ambitious and motivated, despite the hell
they are forced to work in; it is for them and with them that we will stand up and demand academic integrity.