Economics
Economics
What good are economics journals?
Mar 23rd 2011, 18:26 by R.A. | WASHINGTON
YESTERDAY, I wrote a post noting that the archives of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity would now be free and arguing that all journals should follow this lead. They should! Why don't they? At Cheap Talk, Sandeep Baliga writes:
What is a publication in [the American Economic Review] actually worth in terms of salary? Bob Margo estimates the impact of AER articles in his contribution to the anniversary volume. In passing, Bob mentions an article which estimates the salary impact of an AER publication. The author Raymond Sauer finds:
“The full return to a 10-AEQ-page article in the top journal is thus estimated to be a 3.8 percent increase in salary.” (AEQ means the article is adjusted for page size to correspond to AER page length.)
I found this interesting, because it resonated with something Mark Thoma emailed me after I published my post yesterday:
Journals really only do one thing now -- help us to make tenure and promotion decisions. Nobody reads the journals themselves much anymore, but where a paper hits is critical for promotion decisions. That's where the pecking order is established. The sciences are trying to break out of this, to some extent, but econ is a long ways from doing that.
The curatorial value of the journals may not be of much benefit to readers (who, after all, now have many ways to find out about and access papers). But it seems to be of real benefit to universities, who appear to rely on journals to do their talent evaluation work for them.
So perhaps the universities should be the ones paying to support the journals. Or perhaps the journals should charge professors to have their work published. But it doesn't seem to make much sense to have readers pay to provide this service.
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It is important that the debate concerning economics journals not be extended to all academic journals, at least, not without significant further evidence. In my field (philosophy) people still read entire articles, not just abstracts. Journals are important not only for academic advancement/evaluation but also for disseminating information within the field. Availability has changed with the ability to post things online, but one typically has so much to read that unless an article is posted by someone already familiar, one relies on the journals to sort good from bad.
Concerning PrestoPundit's comment re:taxpayers. This is not clearly true, and to the extent that it is, only true for public universities. Further, such work is not behind a paywall because residents of a state can typically walk into a State University library and read the journals in the stacks, make copies, etc. They usually can get library privileges concerning checking out books and getting electronic access. So what Prestopundit said simply rings false.
"Or perhaps the journals should charge professors to have their work published."
As with the credit rating agencies, allowing professors in effect to pay for their own professional rating would undermine the credibility of the system.
I'm not even aware of many people within university Econ departments who read economics journals. Nowadays a studying of the abstract is all that is necessary before citing in one's own paper.
Anyhow, to answer the question posed by R.A., I think the answer lies in the fact that one of the most discussed economics papers in the last few years was published by a lawyer in a scientific journal (Searchinger et al. Science 2008; 319:1238).
How many people or institutions other than university libraries still subscribe to journals?
So perhaps (to first approximation) the universities are already paying to support the journals; they're just showing up on the wrong budget line inside the university.
Taxpayers pay for most all of this academic research -- but the public is put on the outside of a pay wall, excluding them from consuming what they have paid for.
Academia is an interest group captured, government funded monopoly designed for the benefit of the guild members controlling the monopoly -- this fact is the first step in trying to make sense of what happens in the institution.
The AER is an official guild publication of the American Economic Association -- one of many official guild publications.
The journals exist advance the interests of the guild members.
An honest ranking of those interests would put professional advancement at the head of the list -- well ahead of any cognitive goal.
Academic journals in general are supported by library subscriptions and do levy page charges on authors. Is this not true of economics journals ?