ReseaRch Quality assuRance foR the futuRe a ... - Lund University

Panel 7 – ECONOMICS AND MANAGEMENT (LUSEM)
7. Department of Statistics
7.1 Unit description
This is a very small unit (on average 2 professors, an academic staff
total of 3 persons) also involved in teaching, and with a modest Ph.D.
production (1 exam in last 5 years). The age structure is rather high, and
the proportion of external research funding in relation to the funding for
basic education is modest.
7.2 Research infrastructure
The small size of the department prevents the formation of research
groups. Each professor tries to cover a few fields. Overall, the department
tries to cover a rather large field in statistics, related e.g. both to biostatistics,
medical diagnostics, economic history, political sciences, economics,
and stochastic finance. Besides (or related to) its small size, the department
is burdened by a heavy teaching load, and seems to get much less financing
per student than other departments in Sweden get (others get 50% to 80%
more). The department also has problems in providing external funding
for Ph.D. students due to the abstract nature of the subject.
7.3 Research
Quality: The research is mainly published in good but not in top field
journals, mostly within other fields than mainstream statistics (only 6 of
36 publications in the publication list are mainly in “statistical” journals).
This is of course in line with the nature of the subject, statistics being an
important supporting science for a variety of fields, and it is also a sign of
good cross-disciplinary contacts. However, good ability to reach good statistical
journals would also be expected from a very strong research unit
in statistics. The unit has had some earlier very good success (e.g. Annals
of Probability earlier, and a paper in the top-journal JASA in 2001).
Productivity: Taking its small size into consideration, the unit has been
quite productive, with the highest number of refereed journal articles
per academic staff member among the units evaluated by this panel (15
refereed journal articles per staff member during 5 years i.e. on average
3 per academic staff and year). Most of the unit’s research is published in
refereed journals. The publication activity seems to be well distributed
among the staff members, and the time trend is stable.
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