Cumulative Habilitations and Journal Lists
Criteria for Cumulative Habilitations
- The achievement of the habilitation criteria serves as a guideline for the habilitation applicant to initiate a habilitation procedure at the Faculty of Economics and Statistics. If the following habilitation criteria are not fulfilled, an application for the initiation of a habilitation procedure is not recommended. The provisions of § 103, UG2002 as amended, the relevant provisions of the Statutes of the University of Innsbruck and the Habilitation Guidelines of the Senate remain unaffected. The final decision on habilitation is made by the habilitation committee.
- The habilitation criteria have the goal to sustainably enhance the appointment ability and the appointment chances of habilitation applicants.
- The present habilitation criteria refer exclusively to cumulative habilitations with publications in scientific journals. Habilitations with monographs and other achievements are excluded. The evaluation of such achievements is to be carried out by the habilitation committee and the respective reviewers.
- The requirements formulated below are based on a contractual relationship of six years (for "internal" habilitation applicants).
For the quality evaluation of the submitted journal articles, subject-related rankings of the journals are used, namely the Tinbergen List (list of the Tinbergen Institute at the University of Amsterdam) and the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) from the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge. Both are updated at regular intervals and are increasingly used as a standard for the evaluation of researchers.
Based on the rankings, journal articles are divided into categories 1 and 2, with category 1 comprising journals that have a particularly high impact or reputation. Within the categories, further fine gradations are provided depending on the subject (economics or statistics). The details are listed below.
Category 1 includes all journals included in the Tinbergen list as well as all journals that have an impact factor in the JCR that is above the median value of the respective economics-relevant field. All other journals that are included in the economics-relevant categories of the JCR belong to category 2.
Category 1 journals are further subdivided into:
AA: Top 5.
A: Leading journals with a general purpose (General Purpose) and top journals in specialized economic disciplines (Top Field).
B: Refereed journals with a high impact or reputation.
The AA category is defined exclusively by the Tinbergen list. Category A includes all journals that are either listed as such in the Tinbergen List or that belong to the top decile of an economics-related category in the JCR according to their impact factor. All other publications in category 1 belong to subgroup B. The classification is based on five-year averages of the impact factors.
In addition to the category "Economics" in the JCR, further JCR categories can be added depending on the orientation of the habilitation, provided that the corresponding papers have an economics focus. The journals are then classified into category 1 and 2 within these JCR categories also based on the median impact factor (no top 5). It is up to the committee and the reviewers to decide which additional category is relevant or whether there is an economics focus in the papers.
The subdivision into categories 1 and 2 is based on the JCR in the "Statistics & Probability" category. Journals above the median impact factor belong to category 1, all others to category 2. Five-year averages of impact factors are used for classification.
The following additional provisions apply: Five journals from Category 1 will be designated as "Top 5" journals. In alphabetical order: Annals of Applied Statistics, Annals of Statistics, Biometrika, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society B.
In addition to the "Statistics & Probability" category, other JCR categories may be added depending on the orientation of the habilitation, provided that the corresponding papers have a statistical-methodological focus. Conceivable JCR categories could be "Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence", "Mathematical & Computational Biology", "Psychology, Mathematical", "Social Sciences, Mathematical Methods", as these have a high density of statistical-methodical journals that are not ranked in "Statistics & Probability". The journals are then classified into category 1 and 2 within these JCR categories also based on the median impact factor (no top 5). It is up to the committee and the reviewers to decide which additional category is relevant or whether there is a statistical-methodological focus in the papers.
For a cumulative habilitation, eight peer-reviewed journal articles must be submitted, at least four of which must be in category 1 (see below for details). The date of submission to the journal is decisive for the classification of a journal in one of the categories. At the time of application, the confirmation of publication is sufficient. A discount system is intended to create incentives to publish in particularly high-quality journals.
A publication from category AA (or A) counts as four (or two) category 1 publications. If, for example, an A publication is submitted, six additional peer-reviewed articles, two from Category 1 (at least B) and four from Category 2, are sufficient for the submission of the habilitation. Furthermore, 6 publications in Level B of Category 1 are considered sufficient and are thus classified as equivalent to the sum of 4 publications in Level B of Category 1 and 4 publications in Category 2.
A Top 5 publication counts as two Category 1 publications. A maximum of one category 1 publication can also be achieved by two category 2 publications. For example, the required eight journal articles could consist of four category 2 publications plus one of the following combinations:
- four Category 1 publications,
- one top 5 and two category 1 publications,
- three Category 1 and two additional Category 2 publications,
- one top-5, one category-1 and two category-2 publications, etc.
There is no weighting by co-authors. Single authorship is desired, but not required for the submission of a collective doctoral thesis. With at least one single authorship, the minimum number of publications is reduced to seven (instead of eight). [Nothing else changes, however, i.e. the category 1 equivalents and the above-mentioned substitution rules remain unaffected. Multiple sole authorship also brings no further change].
Download Kriterien für Kumulativhabilitationen in pdf Format (German only).