No Wonder Mungo was such a great chair

Interesting piece at VOX describing research done on how the citation history of a department head is correlated with changes in the publishing performance of the department down the road.

Here's the money shot:

My boy KG Mungowitz sits at around 5400 cites on Google Scholar.  I think Duke owes him some royalties or something.

Here's what the article says about some common departmental decision rules:

It is not unusual for senior administrators to select chairs who have either undergone a decline in research productivity or made fewer research-specific investments over their careers (McDowell, Singell, and Stater 2009, 2011). Our study suggests that this may be a mistake.

Hat tip to Mark Thoma