andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-371 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen links to a paper by Bruno Frey on the lack of space for articles in economics journals. Frey writes: To further their careers, [academic economists] are required to publish in A-journals, but for the vast majority this is impossible because there are few slots open in such journals. Such academic competition maybe useful to generate hard work, however, there may be serious negative consequences: the wrong output may be produced in an inefficient way, the wrong people may be selected, and losers may react in a harmful way. According to Frey, the consensus is that there are only five top economics journals–and one of those five is Econometrica, which is so specialized that I’d say that, for most academic economists, there are only four top places they can publish. The difficulty is that demand for these slots outpaces supply: for example, in 2007 there were only 275 articles in all these journals combined (or 224 if you exclude Econometrica), while “a rough estim
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1 Tyler Cowen links to a paper by Bruno Frey on the lack of space for articles in economics journals. [sent-1, score-0.28]
2 Frey writes: To further their careers, [academic economists] are required to publish in A-journals, but for the vast majority this is impossible because there are few slots open in such journals. [sent-2, score-0.284]
3 Such academic competition maybe useful to generate hard work, however, there may be serious negative consequences: the wrong output may be produced in an inefficient way, the wrong people may be selected, and losers may react in a harmful way. [sent-3, score-0.868]
4 According to Frey, the consensus is that there are only five top economics journals–and one of those five is Econometrica, which is so specialized that I’d say that, for most academic economists, there are only four top places they can publish. [sent-4, score-1.104]
5 The difficulty is that demand for these slots outpaces supply: for example, in 2007 there were only 275 articles in all these journals combined (or 224 if you exclude Econometrica), while “a rough estimate is that there are around 10,000 academics actively aspiring to publish in A-journals. [sent-5, score-1.09]
6 I wonder if part of the problem with the econ journals is that economists enjoy competition. [sent-7, score-0.809]
7 If there were not such a restricted space in top journals, they wouldn’t have a good way to keep score . [sent-8, score-0.397]
8 Just by comparison, I’ve published in most of the top statistics journals, but my most cited articles have appeared in Statistical Science, Statistica Sinica, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, and Bayesian Analysis. [sent-9, score-0.424]
9 But now let’s take the perspective of a consumer of economics journals, rather than thinking about the producers of the articles. [sent-11, score-0.36]
10 From my consumer’s perspective, it’s ok that the top five journals are largely an insider’s club (with the occasional exceptional article from an outsider). [sent-12, score-1.019]
11 These insiders have a lot to say, and it seems perfectly reasonable for them to have their own journal. [sent-13, score-0.081]
12 The problem is not the exclusivity of the journals but rather the presumption that outsiders and new entrants should be judged based on their ability to conform to the standards of these journals. [sent-14, score-0.971]
13 The tenured faculty at the top 5 econ depts are great, I’m sure–but does the world really need 10,000 other people trying to become just like them? [sent-15, score-0.473]
14 Again, based on my own experience, some of our most important work is the stuff that does not conform to conventional expectations. [sent-18, score-0.15]
15 ” So, you see, you don’t need to publish in the AER for your papers to get noticed. [sent-26, score-0.148]
16 I don’t know whether this would work with more serious research, though. [sent-28, score-0.066]
17 On an unrelated note, if you have to describe someone as “ famous ,” he’s not. [sent-32, score-0.175]
18 (Unless you’re using “famous” to distinguish two different people with the same name (for example, “Michael Jordan–not the famous one”), but it doesn’t look like that’s what’s going on here. [sent-33, score-0.118]
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen links to a paper by Bruno Frey on the lack of space for articles in economics journals. Frey writes: To further their careers, [academic economists] are required to publish in A-journals, but for the vast majority this is impossible because there are few slots open in such journals. Such academic competition maybe useful to generate hard work, however, there may be serious negative consequences: the wrong output may be produced in an inefficient way, the wrong people may be selected, and losers may react in a harmful way. According to Frey, the consensus is that there are only five top economics journals–and one of those five is Econometrica, which is so specialized that I’d say that, for most academic economists, there are only four top places they can publish. The difficulty is that demand for these slots outpaces supply: for example, in 2007 there were only 275 articles in all these journals combined (or 224 if you exclude Econometrica), while “a rough estim
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Introduction: Someone pointed me to this letter to Bruno Frey from the editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. ( Background here , also more here from Olaf Storbeck.) The journal editor was upset about Frey’s self-plagiarism, and Frey responded with an apology: It was a grave mistake on our part for which we deeply apologize. It should never have happened. This is deplorable. . . . Please be assured that we take all precautions and measures that this unfortunate event does not happen again, with any journal. What I wonder is: How “deplorable” does Frey really think this is? You don’t publish a paper in 5 different places by accident! Is Frey saying that he knew this was deplorable back then and he did it anyway, based on calculation balancing the gains from multiple publications vs. the potential losses if he got caught? Or is he saying that the conduct is deplorable, but he didn’t realize it was deplorable when he did it? My guess is that Frey does not actually think the r
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Introduction: We’ve had lots of lively discussions of fatally-flawed papers that have been published in top, top journals such as the American Economic Review or the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology or the American Sociological Review or the tabloids . And we also know about mistakes that make their way into mid-ranking outlets such as the Journal of Theoretical Biology. But what about results that appear in the lower tier of legitimate journals? I was thinking about this after reading a post by Dan Kahan slamming a paper that recently appeared in PLOS-One. I won’t discuss the paper itself here because that’s not my point. Rather, I had some thoughts regarding Kahan’s annoyance that a paper with fatal errors was published at all. I commented as follows: Read between the lines. The paper originally was released in 2009 and was published in 2013 in PLOS-One, which is one step above appearing on Arxiv. PLOS-One publishes some good things (so does Arxiv) but it’s the place
Introduction: As regular readers of this blog are aware, I am fascinated by academic and scientific cheating and the excuses people give for it. Bruno Frey and colleagues published a single article (with only minor variants) in five different major journals, and these articles did not cite each other. And there have been several other cases of his self-plagiarism (see this review from Olaf Storbeck). I do not mind the general practice of repeating oneself for different audiences—in the social sciences, we call this Arrow’s Theorem —but in this case Frey seems to have gone a bit too far. Blogger Economic Logic has looked into this and concluded that this sort of common practice is standard in “the context of the German(-speaking) academic environment,” and what sets Frey apart is not his self-plagiarism or even his brazenness but rather his practice of doing it in high-visibility journals. Economic Logic writes that “[Frey's] contribution is pedagogical, he found a good and interesting
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