Meanwhile, if you're a chemist, there's a competition to see if your article ranks among the top 3,000 or so. You just need to submit to one journal (JACS), and typically the time to acceptance is under two months.
The economics system is incredibly inefficient.
5
8
72
Replies
A few (more) thoughts on the evolution of scholarly publishing, abetted by the metrics computed by the
@eigenfactor
project.
Authors supply content, journals demand it. Journals publish when quality exceeds a certain threshold.
What happens when supply increases?
6
27
70
Journals can respond by holding the threshold constant and publishing more, or raising the bar for publication. Or somewhere on the continuum between the two.
In economics over the past half-century, the dominant choice has been to raise the bar. Why?
Two words: impact factor.
1
3
17
Impact factor is a measure of average article quality. In a world where there is competition among journals, and the "winner" is the one with highest impact factor, expanding capacity when supply increases is a losing strategy.
This is where the
@eigenfactor
measures come in.
1
1
6
One can rank a journal by citations per article, or by total citations.
@eigenfactor
does both.
This image shows trends at the Journal of Political Economy: brown line is based on cites/article, blue is total cites. JPE has boosted the former at the expense of the latter.
1
0
2
Here's the AER for comparison. The AER made a conscious effort to expand available space, and we see that the total impact measure more closely tracks the per-article impact measure.
Ranked by impact per article, JPE>AER. But by total impact the rankings reverse.
1
0
5
The top five journals, between them, publish just over 400 articles per year. So every year there's a competition by authors to see if their article ranks among the top 400. It often requires submission to 3-5 journals in sequence, and typically takes years.
1
1
12
@adamgmartin
I'll say "maybe." According to
@BLS_gov
the ratio of postsecondary-teaching chemists to economists is about 1.65:1. I don't know if that's exactly the right ratio.
0
0
0
@JakeVigdor
what's the relative size of the pool of authors in econ vs chemistry? are the fields about the same size?
0
0
0
@JakeVigdor
Economists: How dare politicians enact inefficient policies, they can and should do better!
Also Economists: Our own stuff is rather inefficient, but change is too hard, so oh well
0
0
2
