Disciplinary
Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics
David Card & Stefano DellaVigna
NBER Working Paper, January 2013
Abstract:
How has publishing in top economics journals changed since 1970? Using a data set that combines information on all articles published in the top-5 journals from 1970 to 2012 with their Google Scholar citations, we identify nine key trends. First, annual submissions to the top-5 journals nearly doubled from 1990 to 2012. Second, the total number of articles published in these journals actually declined from 400 per year in the late 1970s to 300 per year most recently. As a result, the acceptance rate has fallen from 15% to 6%, with potential implications for the career progression of young scholars. Third, one journal, the American Economic Review, now accounts for 40% of top-5 publications, up from 25% in the 1970s. Fourth, recently published papers are on average 3 times longer than they were in the 1970s, contributing to the relative shortage of journal space. Fifth, the number of authors per paper has increased from 1.3 in 1970 to 2.3 in 2012, partly offsetting the fall in the number of articles per year. Sixth, citations for top-5 publications are high: among papers published in the late 1990s, the median number of Google Scholar citations is 200. Seventh, the ranking of journals by citations has remained relatively stable, with the notable exception of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which climbed from fourth place to first place over the past three decades. Eighth, citation counts are significantly higher for longer papers and those written by more co-authors. Ninth, although the fraction of articles from different fields published in the top-5 has remained relatively stable, there are important cohort trends in the citations received by papers from different fields, with rising citations to more recent papers in Development and International, and declining citations to recent papers in Econometrics and Theory.
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Thomas Rabovsky & William Curtis Ellis
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: This study examines grant funding to four-year universities to determine if institutions with more powerful congressional delegations receive more in research funding from the NIH and NSF.
Methods: We analyze grant awards to 1,501 universities from 2000 through 2009. We employ fixed and random effects models to determine the influence of representation on key congressional committees, in conjunction with institutional characteristics such as size and mission, in shaping institutional success in securing grant revenues.
Results: Time-series cross-sectional analysis suggests that members of the U.S. House and Senate may be able to influence the allocation of seemingly merit-based grants and contracts made by the National Institutes of Health, but not the National Science Foundation.
Conclusion: We find that congressional-bureaucratic relationships appear to directly impact grant receipts, and that structural and organizational variations across bureaucratic agencies have important mitigating effects on the extent to which issues of political control matter.
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No End to the Consensus in Macroeconomic Theory? A Methodological Inquiry
John McCombie & Maureen Pike
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, April 2013, Pages 497-528
Abstract:
After the acrimonious debates between the New Classical and New Keynesian economists in the 1980s and 1990s, a consensus developed, namely, the New Neoclassical Synthesis. However, the 2007 credit crunch exposed the severe limitations of this approach. This article presents a methodological analysis of the New Neoclassical Synthesis and how the paradigmatic heuristic of the representative agent, namely, market clearing subject to sticky prices, excluded the Keynesian notion of involuntary unemployment arising from lack of effective demand. It shows these models may be modified to produce Keynesian results, but are ruled out of consideration by proponents of the New Neoclassical approach by weak incommensurability. It concludes that because of this the New Neoclassical Synthesis, in spite of its failure to explain the sub-prime crisis, is likely to resist successfully the resurgence in Keynesian economics.
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Demographics and the fate of the young scientist
Samuel Arbesman & Brad Wray
Social Studies of Science, April 2013, Pages 282-286
Abstract:
Many have suggested that young scientists are having a more difficult time getting research grants, citing the fact that the average age of recipients of prestigious grants is getting higher. We present a population model that suggests that the reason the average age of grant recipients is now higher is because the growth rate of science has slowed down in the last four decades.
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Douglas Stenstrom, Mathew Curtis & Ravi Iyer
Perspectives on Psychological Science, March 2013, Pages 208-217
Abstract:
The outcome of a graduate student's hunt for employment is often attributed to the student's own accomplishments, the reputation of the department, and the reputation of the university. In 2007, a national survey of psychology graduate students was conducted to assess accomplishments and experiences in graduate school, part of which was an assessment of employment after completion of the doctorate (PhD). Five hundred and fifty-one respondents who had applied for employment reported whether they had obtained employment and in what capacity. Survey results were then integrated with the National Research Council's most recent official ranking system of academic departments. The strongest predictor of employment was department-level rankings even while controlling for individual accomplishments, such as publications, posters, and teaching experience. Equally accomplished applicants for an employment position were not equal, apparently, if they graduated from differently ranked departments. The results also show the degree to which school-level rankings, department-level rankings, and individual accomplishments uniquely predict the various types of employment, including jobs at PhD-granting institutions, master's-granting institutions, liberal arts colleges, 2-year schools, outside academia, or no employment at all.
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Marion Fourcade & Rakesh Khurana
Theory and Society, March 2013, Pages 121-159
Abstract:
This article draws on historical material to examine the co-evolution of economic science and business education over the course of the twentieth century, showing that fields evolve not only through internal struggles but also through struggles taking place in adjacent fields. More specifically, we argue that the scientific strategies of business schools played an essential - if largely invisible and poorly understood - role in major transformations in the organization and substantive direction of social-scientific knowledge, and specifically economic knowledge, in twentieth century America. We use the Wharton School as an illustration of the earliest trends and dilemmas (ca. 1900-1930), when business schools found themselves caught between their business connections and their striving for moral legitimacy in higher education. Next, we look at the creation of the Carnegie Tech Graduate School of Industrial Administration after World War II. This episode illustrates the increasingly successful claims of social scientists, backed by philanthropic foundations, on business education and the growing appeal of "scientific" approaches to decision-making and management. Finally, we argue that the rise of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago from the 1960s onwards (and its closely related cousin at the University of Rochester) marks the decisive ascendancy of economics, and particularly financial economics, in business education over the other behavioral disciplines. We document the key role of these institutions in diffusing "Chicago-style" economic approaches - offering support for deregulatory policies and popularizing narrowly financial understandings of the firm - that sociologists have described as characteristic of the modern neo-liberal regime.
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Beyond the Hype: The Value of Evolutionary Theorizing in Economics
Armin Schulz
Philosophy of the Social Sciences, March 2013, Pages 46-72
Abstract:
In this paper, I consider the recent resurgence of "evolutionary economics" - the idea that evolutionary theory can be very useful to push forward key debates in economics - and assess the extent to which it rests on a plausible foundation. To do this, I first distinguish two ways in which evolutionary theory can, in principle, be brought to bear on an economic problem - namely, evidentially and heuristically - and then apply this distinction to the three major hypotheses that evolutionary economists have come to defend: the implausibility of rational choice theory as an account of economic rationality, the idea that firms are autonomous economic agents, and the need for a more dynamic, less equilibrium-focused economic methodology. In each of these cases, I conclude negatively: the relevant evolutionary considerations neither suggest interesting and novel hypotheses to investigate further (the hallmark of heuristic devices) nor are backed up by the needed data to constitute genuine evidence. I end by distinguishing this criticism of evolutionary economics from others that have been put forward in the literature: in particular, I make clear that, unlike those of other critics, the arguments of this paper are based on epistemic - not structural - considerations and therefore leave more room for a plausible form of evolutionary economics to come about in the future.
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Marginalization processes in science: The controversy about the theory of relativity in the 1920s
Milena Wazeck
Social Studies of Science, April 2013, Pages 163-190
Abstract:
In the 1920s, hundreds of pamphlets were published whose authors self-confidently claimed to have refuted the theory of relativity. The opposition to relativity was extraordinarily fierce and lasted years, including not only physicists and philosophers but also scientific laymen. What were the motives of Einstein's opponents? On what basis was the theory of relativity attacked so vociferously? This article focuses on the emergence of a heterogeneous international network of academic and nonacademic opponents to Einstein in the early 1920s and suggests a theoretical approach for understanding the nature of the controversy about the theory of relativity. I argue that the controversy about the theory of relativity represents a type of controversy that is unresolvable because of the ontological commitments underlying the arguments against academic consensus and the social dynamics of a process of marginalization of proponents of deviant knowledge.
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A Day Among the Diehard Terrorists: The Psychological Costs of Doing Ethnographic Research
Alessandro Orsini
Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, April 2013, Pages 337-351
Abstract:
This article describes the experience of a sociologist who made contact with a group of diehard terrorists responsible for multiple murders in order to conduct an ethnographic study. After outlining the sociological profile of the diehard terrorists, the author - making reference to the ethnographic studies of Jack Douglas, Martin Sanchez Jankowski, and Laud Humphreys - describes how he followed their traces. The aim of the article is to analyze the psychological costs that the sociologist must pay when he interacts with men and women who, in addition to proudly claiming credit for the homicides they have committed, affirm the importance of continuing to kill in order to salvage humanity's future.
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Revealed Preferences for Journals: Evidence from Page Limits
David Card & Stefano DellaVigna
NBER Working Paper, December 2012
Abstract:
Academic journals set a variety of policies that affect the supply of new manuscripts. We study the impact of page limit policies adopted by the American Economic Review (AER) in 2008 and the Journal of the European Economic Association (JEEA) in 2009 in response to a substantial increase in the length of articles in economics. We focus the analysis on the decision by potential authors to either shorten a longer manuscript in response to the page limit, or submit to another journal. For the AER we find little indication of a loss of longer papers - instead, authors responded by shortening the text and reformatting their papers. For JEEA, in contrast, we estimate that the page length policy led to nearly complete loss of longer manuscripts. These findings provide a revealed-preference measure of competition between journals and indicate that a top-5 journal has substantial monopoly power over submissions, unlike a journal one notch below. At both journals we find that longer papers were more likely to receive a revise and resubmit verdict prior to page limits, suggesting that the loss of longer papers may have had a detrimental effect on quality at JEEA. Despite a modest impact of the AER's policy on the average length of submissions (-5%), the policy had little or no effect on the length of final accepted manuscripts. Our results highlight the importance of evaluating editorial policies.
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Replication, statistical consistency, and publication bias
Gregory Francis
Journal of Mathematical Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scientific methods of investigation offer systematic ways to gather information about the world; and in the field of psychology application of such methods should lead to a better understanding of human behavior. Instead, recent reports in psychological science have used apparently scientific methods to report strong evidence for unbelievable claims such as precognition. To try to resolve the apparent conflict between unbelievable claims and the scientific method many researchers turn to empirical replication to reveal the truth. Such an approach relies on the belief that true phenomena can be successfully demonstrated in well-designed experiments, and the ability to reliably reproduce an experimental outcome is widely considered the gold standard of scientific investigations. Unfortunately, this view is incorrect; and misunderstandings about replication contribute to the conflicts in psychological science. Because experimental effects in psychology are measured by statistics, there should almost always be some variability in the reported outcomes. An absence of such variability actually indicates that experimental replications are invalid, perhaps because of a bias to suppress contrary findings or because the experiments were run improperly. Recent investigations have demonstrated how to identify evidence of such invalid experiment sets and noted its appearance for prominent findings in experimental psychology. The present manuscript explores those investigative methods by using computer simulations to demonstrate their properties and limitations. The methods are shown to be a check on the statistical consistency of a set of experiments by comparing the reported power of the experiments with the reported frequency of statistical significance. Overall, the methods are extremely conservative about reporting inconsistency when experiments are run properly and reported fully. The manuscript also considers how to improve scientific practice to avoid inconsistency, and discusses criticisms of the investigative method.
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Rising Publication Delays Inflate Journal Impact Factors
Adriano Tort, Zé Targino & Olavo Amaral
PLoS ONE, January 2013
Abstract:
Journal impact factors have become an important criterion to judge the quality of scientific publications over the years, influencing the evaluation of institutions and individual researchers worldwide. However, they are also subject to a number of criticisms. Here we point out that the calculation of a journal's impact factor is mainly based on the date of publication of its articles in print form, despite the fact that most journals now make their articles available online before that date. We analyze 61 neuroscience journals and show that delays between online and print publication of articles increased steadily over the last decade. Importantly, such a practice varies widely among journals, as some of them have no delays, while for others this period is longer than a year. Using a modified impact factor based on online rather than print publication dates, we demonstrate that online-to-print delays can artificially raise a journal's impact factor, and that this inflation is greater for longer publication lags. We also show that correcting the effect of publication delay on impact factors changes journal rankings based on this metric. We thus suggest that indexing of articles in citation databases and calculation of citation metrics should be based on the date of an article's online appearance, rather than on that of its publication in print.
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Phillipa Chong
Social Studies of Science, April 2013, Pages 265-281
Abstract:
This article considers affinities between artistic and scientific evaluations. Objectivity has been widely studied, as it is thought the foundation for legitimate judgments of truth. Yet we know comparatively little about subjectivity apart from its characterization as the obstacle to objective knowledge. In this article, I examine how subjectivity operates as an epistemic virtue in artistic evaluation, which is an especially interesting field for study given the accepted relativism of taste. Data are taken from interviews with 30 book reviewers drawn from major American newspapers including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and others. The data reveal that critics invest in a set of strategies to effectively ‘objectivize' the subjectivity intrinsic to artistic evaluation, which I refer to collectively as strategies for maintaining critical distance. I argue that the concrete procedures for producing legitimate judgment in the world of art can be usefully compared to the norms for legitimate judgment in science.