Check out:
PUBLISHING AND PROMOTION IN ECONOMICS:
THE TYRANNY OF THE TOP FIVE
by
James J. Heckman and Sidharth Moktan
NBER Working Paper 25093
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25093
Heckman et al. examine a range of data from a variety of perspectives, analyze them thoroughly, and pull no punches in describing their striking results.
It's a great paper. There's a lot I could add, maybe in a future post, but my blood pressure is already high enough for today. So I'll just leave you with a few choice quotes from the paper ["T5" means "top-5 economics journals" ]:
"The results ... support the hypothesis that the T5 influence operates through channels that are independent of article quality."
"Reliance on the T5 to screen talent incentivizes careerism over creativity."
"Economists at highly ranked departments with established reputations are increasingly
not publishing in T5 or field journals and more often post papers online in influential
working paper series, which are highly cited, but not counted as T5s."
"Many non-T5 articles are better cited than
many articles in T5 journals. ... Indeed, many of the most important papers published in the past 50 years have been
too innovative to survive the T5 gauntlet."
"The [list of] most cited non-T5 papers reads like an honor roll of economic analysis."
"The T5 ignores publication of books. Becker’s Human Capital
(1964) has more than 4 times the number of citations of any paper listed on RePEc. The exclusion of books from citation warps incentives against broad and integrated research and towards writing bite-sized fragments of ideas."
Showing posts with label Publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Publishing. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Sunday, September 23, 2018
NBER WP's Hit 25,000
A few weeks ago the NBER released WP25000, What a great NBER service -- there have been 7.6 million downloads of NBER WP's in the last year alone.
This milestone is of both current and historical interest. The history is especially interesting. As Jim Poterba notes in a recent communication:
This morning's "New this Week" email included the release of the 25000th NBER working paper, a study of the intergenerational transmission of human capital by David Card, Ciprian Domnisoru, and Lowell Taylor. The NBER working paper series was launched in 1973, at the inspiration of Robert Michael, who sought a way for NBER-affiliated researchers to share their findings and obtain feedback prior to publication. The first working paper was "Education, Information, and Efficiency" by Finis Welch. The design for the working papers -- which many will recall appeared with yellow covers in the pre-digital age -- was created by H. Irving Forman, the NBER's long-serving chart-maker and graphic artist.
Initially there were only a few dozen working papers per year, but as the number of NBER-affiliated researchers grew, particularly after Martin Feldstein became NBER president in 1977, the NBER working paper series also expanded. In recent years, there have been about 1150 papers per year. Over the 45 year history of the working paper series, the Economic Fluctuations and Growth Program has accounted for nearly twenty percent (4916) of the papers, closely followed by Labor Studies (4891) and Public Economics (4877).
Saturday, September 15, 2018
An Open Letter to Tren Griffin
[I tried quite hard to email this privately. I post it here only because Griffin has, as far as I can tell, been very successful in scrubbing his email address from the web. Please forward it to him if you can figure out how.]
Mr. Griffin:
A colleague forwarded me your post, https://25iq.com/2018/09/08/risk-uncertainty-and-ignorance-in-investing-and-business-lessons-from-richard-zeckhauser/. I enjoyed it, and Zeckhauser definitely deserves everyone's highest praise.
However your post misses the bigger picture. Diebold, Doherty, and Herring conceptualized and promoted the "Known, Unknown, Unknowable" (KuU) framework for financial risk management, which runs blatantly throughout your twelve "Lessons From Richard Zeckhauser". Indeed the key Zeckhauser article on which you draw appeared in our book, "The Known, the Unknown and the Unknowable in Financial Risk Management", https://press.princeton.edu/titles/9223.html, which we also conceptualized, and for which we solicited the papers and authors, mentored them as regards integrating their thoughts into the KuU framework, etc. The book was published almost a decade ago by Princeton University Press.
However your post misses the bigger picture. Diebold, Doherty, and Herring conceptualized and promoted the "Known, Unknown, Unknowable" (KuU) framework for financial risk management, which runs blatantly throughout your twelve "Lessons From Richard Zeckhauser". Indeed the key Zeckhauser article on which you draw appeared in our book, "The Known, the Unknown and the Unknowable in Financial Risk Management", https://press.princeton.edu/titles/9223.html, which we also conceptualized, and for which we solicited the papers and authors, mentored them as regards integrating their thoughts into the KuU framework, etc. The book was published almost a decade ago by Princeton University Press.
I say all this not only to reveal my surprise and annoyance at your apparent unawareness, but also, and more constructively, because you and your readers may be interested in our KuU book, which has many other interesting parts (great as the Zeckhauser part may be), and which, moreover, is more than the sum of its parts. A pdf of the first chapter has been available for many years at http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9223.pdf.
Sincerely,
Thursday, March 8, 2018
H-Index for Journals
In an earlier rant, I suggested that journals move from tracking inane citation "impact factors" to citation "H indexes" or similar, just as routinely done when evaluating individual authors. It turns out that RePEc already does it, here. There are literally many thousands of journals ranked. I show the top 25 below. Interestingly, four "field" journals actually make the top 10, effectively making them "super (uber?) field journals" (J. Finance, J. Financial Economics, J. Monetary Economics, and J. Econometrics). For example, J. Econometrics is basically indistinguishable from Review of Economic Studies.
The rankings
Sunday, October 1, 2017
Economics Working Papers now in arXiv
Economics working papers are now a part of arXiv. This is great news, as arXiv is the premier working paper hosting platform in mathematics and the mathematical / statistical sciences. The Economics arXiv will start with a single subject area of Econometrics (econ.EM). More economics subject areas will be added (of course), and moreover, subject areas can and will be subdivided. Hats off to the econ.EM team (Victor Chernozhukov, MIT; Iván Fernández-Val, Boston University; Marc Henry, Penn State; Francesca Molinari, Cornell; Jörg Stoye, Bonn & Cornell; Martin Weidner, University College London). The full announcement is here.
Monday, April 3, 2017
The Latest on the "File Drawer Problem"
The term "file drawer problem" was coined long ago. It refers to the bias in published empirical studies toward "large", or "significant", or "good" estimates. That is, "small"/"insignificant"/"bad" estimates remain unpublished, in file drawers (or, in modern times, on hard drives). Correcting the bias is a tough nut to crack, since little is known about the nature or number of unpublished studies. For the latest, together with references to the relevant earlier literature, see the interesting new NBER working paper, IDENTIFICATION OF AND CORRECTION FOR PUBLICATION BIAS, by Isaiah AndrewsMaximilian Kasy. There's an ungated version and appendix here, and a nice set of slides here.
Abstract: Some empirical results are more likely to be published than others. Such selective publication leads to biased estimators and distorted inference. This paper proposes two approaches for identifying the conditional probability of publication as a function of a study's results, the first based on systematic replication studies and the second based on meta-studies. For known conditional publication probabilities, we propose median-unbiased estimators and associated confidence sets that correct for selective publication. We apply our methods to recent large-scale replication studies in experimental economics and psychology, and to meta-studies of the effects of minimum wages and de-worming programs.
Abstract: Some empirical results are more likely to be published than others. Such selective publication leads to biased estimators and distorted inference. This paper proposes two approaches for identifying the conditional probability of publication as a function of a study's results, the first based on systematic replication studies and the second based on meta-studies. For known conditional publication probabilities, we propose median-unbiased estimators and associated confidence sets that correct for selective publication. We apply our methods to recent large-scale replication studies in experimental economics and psychology, and to meta-studies of the effects of minimum wages and de-worming programs.
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
On "Shorter Papers"
Journals should not corral shorter papers into sections like "Shorter Papers". Doing so sends a subtle (actually unsubtle) message that shorter papers are basically second-class citizens, somehow less good, or less important, or less something -- not just less long -- than longer papers. If a paper is above the bar, then it's above the bar, and regardless of its length it should then be published simply as a paper, not a "shorter paper", or a "note", or anything else. Many shorter papers are much more important than the vast majority of longer papers.
Thursday, December 10, 2015
New Elsevier: Good or Bad?
|
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)