Efficiency and performance analysis of economics research using hesitant fuzzy AHP and OCRA methods

Countries allocate some of their GDP as research and development shares for the sustainability of R&D activities. From time to time, it was aimed to measure how effectively these allocated shares are used by different disciplines. In this study, the efficiency and performance of economics researches in 15 OECD member countries is ranked and evaluated by using bibliometric elements for the period of 2010–2017. 7 different criteria, which are thought to affect the efficiency and performance of economics research, have been determined. By taking the opinions of 5 different experts, criterion weights were calculated with Hesitant Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (Hesitant Fuzzy AHP) method and sequences were obtained by Operational Competitiveness Rating Analysis Method method. The top five countries with the highest performance are England, Germany, Italy, Australia and France and the lowest is Hungary. The results show that if the economics research performance is high in a country, the number of documents indexed in Web of Science, the number of citations and the percentage of documents cited are also high, and the quality of the produced scientific output is also independent of the number of researchers and the allocated research budgets.