Economics Department Receives Top Spot in Media Impact for Kent State

KENT, Ohio - Oct. 16, 2013 - PRLog -- Kent State University’s Economics Department has the most media impact of the top five Kent State departments according to the Center for a Public Anthropology.

The center created the Faculty Media Impact Project to look at how much public university faculty in the social sciences share their research with the larger public.

The top five departments for the university, which ranked 44 among the 94 universities with a score of 4.32, were Economics, Political Science, Anthropology, Psychology and Sociology.

The economics department received the highest score among the Kent State departments with a score of 82.

“It’s an honor for the economics department and for the college,” said Richard Kent, economics department chair.

Kent said the department’s score shows the relevancy of the faculty’s work.

“I think it just shows that the work the faculty in the economics department do is both interesting and important, and not just to academics, but also to the greater community,” Kent said. “It really signifies that we’re doing important, interesting work.”

The scores were determined through a mathematical formula, which then divided the total citation score by the percentage the department received of the total federal funding in that field.

This project examined faculty citations in the Google News Archive during a six-year period, from 2006 to 2011.

Kent said this project is different from other citation evaluations because it did not include citations in any academic publications.

“This is a citation in the public media,” Kent said. “That’s why I think this really signifies that the work the faculty are doing is of interest to the broader public, not just to other academics. It’s not narrow type of research, it’s applicable research to the broader public.”

For more information about the Faculty Media Impact Project, visit http://facultyimpact.publicanthropology.org.

For more information about the Economics Department and the College of Business Administration, visit http://www.kent.edu/business.