Back in 2018, I wrote a post about the emphasis in economics on publishing in the 'top five' journals (the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies). That post was based on this NBER Working Paper by James Heckman and Sidharth Moktan. They found that there was high value (in terms of the probability of achieving tenure) associated with publishing in the top five, although there were troubling gender differences.
So, perhaps the emphasis on the top five is not entirely bad. However, not everyone agrees. This short 2018 paper by Roberto Serrano (Brown University), title "Top5itis" presents a contrary view:
Top5itis is a disease that currently affects the economics discipline. It refers to the obsession of the profession of academic economists with the so-called “top5 journals.” These are, alphabetically, the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies. In its most extreme forms, top5itis reduces the evaluation of a paper to the following test: a paper has any value if and only if it was published by one of the journals in this list. Therefore, in order to evaluate the scientific production of a scholar, a person affected by top5itis simply counts the scholar’s “top5’s.” Since the disease is a simple application of the counting measure (typically a person learns to count in primary school), through a process of contagion, top5itis spreads quickly to affect people outside economics, including schoolchildren offspring of economists who get together in the playground to make disparaging remarks about each other’s parents. With similar patterns, the disease has also spread to competent university administrators and influential granting agencies.
Ok, Serrano's paper is not entirely serious (but worth reading for a lighter take on the issue, especially the 'true stories'). However, there clearly is an overt focus on these top journals in economics, and that has negative unintended consequences (including problems of reporting bias and publication bias, and bias towards 'surprisingness', as mentioned in my previous post). Would Maximilian Kasy's suggested alternative publishing structure solve the problem of top5itis? Unfortunately, it is doubtful (both whether it would be a cure, and whether the alternative is workable).
[HT: Marginal Revolution, back in 2018]
Read more:
No comments:
Post a Comment