<p>The economics rankings look odd too, Hopkins ahead of Princeton and Chicago.
I understand that this is the result of an objective formula, but many formulas are possible- are publications in all journals weighted equally, or are they weighted by the journal's impact factor? Do the citation counts include all journals, or only good ones? What is the relative weight on citations vs publications? And so on. And how to account for differences in department size? This scheme counts per-faculty publications; would a department of only 1 person, highly productive, really be as good for most purposes as a department of that same star plus a few decent but less stellar colleagues?</p>