The is a cottage industry that produces papers about rankings in the profession, rankings about journal, departments, or people in various subfields. These papers are mostly unimaginative and uninteresting, yet they find refuge in obscure field journals in the hope that this will attract a few readers and especially mentions in the honored departments. Why mention this literature? Once you have gathered the data for such a study, it is easy to slice the dataset up to produce rankings for a myriad of subfields. Thus a multiplication of papers. We could just ignore those papers, but I cannot. Indeed, there seems to be a tendency for the authors of these studies to just copy-and-paste from one paper to the author. I reported earlier about a case (who also was writing about professional rankings), and here is another one.
The duplicating fellows are George Halkos and Nickolaos Tzeremes. This tandem is incredibly productive, producing new papers by the shovel. And they got the work flow optimized. Produce a study and then replicate it on a slightly different topic. Do not bother with changing the text, simply substitute the numbers, put a paragraphs here and there for the specifics of the particular slice of the data, and done. Oh, and do not forget to change fonts and margins so that the copy job is not too obvious. Take as an example their line of work on ranking journals. First, there is a paper on journals in Economics, then mainstream journals in Economics, then Accounting, Banking and Finance, then agricultural, environmental and natural resource Economics, then socio-demographic journals. We are waiting with a bated breath for future developments.
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