andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1393 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I’ve whined before in this space that some of my most important, innovative, and influential papers are really hard to get published. I’ll go through endless hassle with a journal or sometimes several journals until I find some place willing to publish. It’s just irritating. I was thinking about this recently because a colleague and I just finished a paper that I love love love. But I can’t figure out where to submit it. This is a paper for which I would prefer the so-called reverse-journal-submission approach. Instead of sending the paper to journal after journal after journal, waiting years until an acceptance (recall that, unless you’re Bruno Frey, you’re not allowed to submit the same paper to multiple journals simultaneously), you post the paper on a public site, and then journals compete to see who gets to publish it. I think that system would work well with a paper like this which is offbeat but has a nontrivial chance of becoming highly influential. P.S. Just to clar
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1 I’ve whined before in this space that some of my most important, innovative, and influential papers are really hard to get published. [sent-1, score-0.394]
2 I’ll go through endless hassle with a journal or sometimes several journals until I find some place willing to publish. [sent-2, score-0.944]
3 I was thinking about this recently because a colleague and I just finished a paper that I love love love. [sent-4, score-0.804]
4 This is a paper for which I would prefer the so-called reverse-journal-submission approach. [sent-6, score-0.352]
5 I think that system would work well with a paper like this which is offbeat but has a nontrivial chance of becoming highly influential. [sent-8, score-0.855]
6 Just to clarify: we’re still revising the paper, that’s why i haven’t posted it yet. [sent-11, score-0.316]
7 When it’s done, I’ll post it on my webpage (maybe Arxiv too, but then I have to make a Latex version of it). [sent-12, score-0.298]
8 But we’ll still want to publish it in a journal and reach the widest possible audience. [sent-13, score-0.842]
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Introduction: I’ve whined before in this space that some of my most important, innovative, and influential papers are really hard to get published. I’ll go through endless hassle with a journal or sometimes several journals until I find some place willing to publish. It’s just irritating. I was thinking about this recently because a colleague and I just finished a paper that I love love love. But I can’t figure out where to submit it. This is a paper for which I would prefer the so-called reverse-journal-submission approach. Instead of sending the paper to journal after journal after journal, waiting years until an acceptance (recall that, unless you’re Bruno Frey, you’re not allowed to submit the same paper to multiple journals simultaneously), you post the paper on a public site, and then journals compete to see who gets to publish it. I think that system would work well with a paper like this which is offbeat but has a nontrivial chance of becoming highly influential. P.S. Just to clar
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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
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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
Introduction: The other day we discussed that paper on ovulation and voting (you may recall that the authors reported a scattered bunch of comparisons, significance tests, and p-values, and I recommended that they would’ve done better to simply report complete summaries of their data, so that readers could see the comparisons of interest in full context), and I was thinking a bit more about why I was so bothered that it was published in Psychological Science, which I’d thought of as a serious research journal. My concern isn’t just that that the paper is bad—after all, lots of bad papers get published—but rather that it had nothing really going for it, except that it was headline bait. It was a survey done on Mechanical Turk, that’s it. No clever design, no clever questions, no care in dealing with nonresponse problems, no innovative data analysis, no nothing. The paper had nothing to offer, except that it had no obvious flaws. Psychology is a huge field full of brilliant researchers.
5 0.23421407 2245 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-12-More on publishing in journals
Introduction: I’m postponing today’s scheduled post (“Empirical implications of Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models”) to continue the lively discussion from yesterday, What if I were to stop publishing in journals? . An example: my papers with Basbøll Thomas Basbøll and I got into a long discussion on our blogs about business school professor Karl Weick and other cases of plagiarism copying text without attribution. We felt it useful to take our ideas to the next level and write them up as a manuscript, which ended up being logical to split into two papers. At that point I put some effort into getting these papers published, which I eventually did: To throw away data: Plagiarism as a statistical crime went into American Scientist and When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences will appear in Sociological Methods and Research. The second paper, in particular, took some effort to place; I got some advice from colleagues in sociology as to where
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Introduction: I’ve whined before in this space that some of my most important, innovative, and influential papers are really hard to get published. I’ll go through endless hassle with a journal or sometimes several journals until I find some place willing to publish. It’s just irritating. I was thinking about this recently because a colleague and I just finished a paper that I love love love. But I can’t figure out where to submit it. This is a paper for which I would prefer the so-called reverse-journal-submission approach. Instead of sending the paper to journal after journal after journal, waiting years until an acceptance (recall that, unless you’re Bruno Frey, you’re not allowed to submit the same paper to multiple journals simultaneously), you post the paper on a public site, and then journals compete to see who gets to publish it. I think that system would work well with a paper like this which is offbeat but has a nontrivial chance of becoming highly influential. P.S. Just to clar
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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: The other day we discussed that paper on ovulation and voting (you may recall that the authors reported a scattered bunch of comparisons, significance tests, and p-values, and I recommended that they would’ve done better to simply report complete summaries of their data, so that readers could see the comparisons of interest in full context), and I was thinking a bit more about why I was so bothered that it was published in Psychological Science, which I’d thought of as a serious research journal. My concern isn’t just that that the paper is bad—after all, lots of bad papers get published—but rather that it had nothing really going for it, except that it was headline bait. It was a survey done on Mechanical Turk, that’s it. No clever design, no clever questions, no care in dealing with nonresponse problems, no innovative data analysis, no nothing. The paper had nothing to offer, except that it had no obvious flaws. Psychology is a huge field full of brilliant researchers.
4 0.89408046 883 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-01-Arrow’s theorem update
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
5 0.86640859 834 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-01-I owe it all to the haters
Introduction: Sometimes when I submit an article to a journal it is accepted right away or with minor alterations. But many of my favorite articles were rejected or had to go through an exhausting series of revisions. For example, this influential article had a very hostile referee and we had to seriously push the journal editor to accept it. This one was rejected by one or two journals before finally appearing with discussion. This paper was rejected by the American Political Science Review with no chance of revision and we had to publish it in the British Journal of Political Science, which was a bit odd given that the article was 100% about American politics. And when I submitted this instant classic (actually at the invitation of the editor), the referees found it to be trivial, and the editor did me the favor of publishing it but only by officially labeling it as a discussion of another article that appeared in the same issue. Some of my most influential papers were accepted right
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Introduction: I’ve whined before in this space that some of my most important, innovative, and influential papers are really hard to get published. I’ll go through endless hassle with a journal or sometimes several journals until I find some place willing to publish. It’s just irritating. I was thinking about this recently because a colleague and I just finished a paper that I love love love. But I can’t figure out where to submit it. This is a paper for which I would prefer the so-called reverse-journal-submission approach. Instead of sending the paper to journal after journal after journal, waiting years until an acceptance (recall that, unless you’re Bruno Frey, you’re not allowed to submit the same paper to multiple journals simultaneously), you post the paper on a public site, and then journals compete to see who gets to publish it. I think that system would work well with a paper like this which is offbeat but has a nontrivial chance of becoming highly influential. P.S. Just to clar
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Introduction: A few months ago, I wrote : Economists seem to rely heavily on a sort of folk psychology, a relic of the 1920s-1950s in which people calculate utilities (or act as if they are doing so) in order to make decisions. A central tenet of economics is that inference or policy recommendation be derived from first principles from this folk-psychology model. This just seems silly to me, as if astronomers justified all their calculations with an underlying appeal to Aristotle’s mechanics. Or maybe the better analogy is the Stalinist era in which everything had to be connected to Marxist principles (followed, perhaps, by an equationful explanation of how the world can be interpreted as if Marxism were valid). Mark Thoma and Paul Krugman seem to agree with me on this one (as does my Barnard colleague Rajiv Sethi ). They don’t go so far as to identify utility etc as folk psychology, but maybe that will come next. P.S. Perhaps this will clarify: In a typical economics research pap
Introduction: After noticing these remarks on expensive textbooks and this comment on the company that bribes professors to use their books, Preston McAfee pointed me to this update (complete with a picture of some guy who keeps threatening to sue him but never gets around to it). The story McAfee tells is sad but also hilarious. Especially the part about “smuck.” It all looks like one more symptom of the imploding market for books. Prices for intro stat and econ books go up and up (even mediocre textbooks routinely cost $150), and the publishers put more and more effort into promotion. McAfee adds: I [McAfee] hope a publisher sues me about posting the articles I wrote. Even a takedown notice would be fun. I would be pretty happy to start posting about that, especially when some of them are charging $30 per article. Ted Bergstrom and I used state Freedom of Information acts to extract the journal price deals at state university libraries. We have about 35 of them so far. Like te
4 0.92617506 1541 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-19-Statistical discrimination again
Introduction: Mark Johnstone writes: I’ve recently been investigating a new European Court of Justice ruling on insurance calculations (on behalf of MoneySuperMarket) and I found something related to statistics that caught my attention. . . . The ruling (which comes into effect in December 2012) states that insurers in Europe can no longer provide different premiums based on gender. Despite the fact that women are statistically safer drivers, unless it’s biologically proven there is a causal relationship between being female and being a safer driver, this is now seen as an act of discrimination (more on this from the Wall Street Journal). However, where do you stop with this? What about age? What about other factors? And what does this mean for the application of statistics in general? Is it inherently unjust in this context? One proposal has been to fit ‘black boxes’ into cars so more individual data can be collected, as opposed to relying heavily on aggregates. For fans of data and s
5 0.92580837 133 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-08-Gratuitous use of “Bayesian Statistics,” a branding issue?
Introduction: I’m on an island in Maine for a few weeks (big shout out for North Haven!) This morning I picked up a copy of “Working Waterfront,” a newspaper that focuses on issues of coastal fishing communities. I came across an article about modeling “fish” populations — actually lobsters, I guess they’re considered “fish” for regulatory purposes. When I read it, I thought “wow, this article is really well-written, not dumbed down like articles in most newspapers.” I think it’s great that a small coastal newspaper carries reporting like this. (The online version has a few things that I don’t recall in the print version, too, so it’s even better). But in addition to being struck by finding such a good article in a small newspaper, I was struck by this: According to [University of Maine scientist Yong] Chen, there are four main areas where his model improved on the prior version. “We included the inshore trawl data from Maine and other state surveys, in addition to federal survey data; we h
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