Erik Voeten describes a new plan in which rejected submissions to the American Economic Review are automatically submitted to lower-status journals, and he asks whether political science could do the same thing. This would be fine, I think, but in any case I suspect it’s less of a big deal in political science. My impression is that the goal of “publishing in the top journal” is more of a big deal in economics than in political science. It’s just not such a big deal to publish in the #1 journal. It’s certainly not like in medicine, where if you publish in the New England Journal, you might hit page 1 of the newspaper. Or like physics or biology, where it’s a big deal to publish in PRL or Cell or whatever.
Actually, economics seems to me more competitive than political science in general. I remember seeing, several years ago, a recommendation letter for an economist applying for a postdoctoral position. One of the letters of recommendation described the candidate as not being good enough for a faculty position at one of the top 8 programs but good enough for anything lower. I mean, c’mon, what kind of silly precision is this?
P.S. Statistics is even less hierarchical than political science. There is no agreed-upon top statistics journal. It depends if you’re doing probability theory, theoretical statistics, or applied statistics, and even then, within each of these subfields there are multiple journals that could be considered as the best. In statistics, we also have the opportunity to publish in subject-matter journals (like the APSR!) or in computer science, engineering, and so forth. So much less pressure.
P.P.S. I’m not saying that statisticians and political scientists are better than political scientists, or that we’re nicer people, just that the fields have different cultures. I’m actually surprised that the academic field of economics is so competitive since I’d assume that, as with statistics, many of the people competing for these jobs could get well-paid non-academic positions easily enough.
I see the benefit from the AEA of this system – less review work – but the general impression, as far as I'm aware, is that the AEA field journals are far, far lower ranked than AER. They are relatively new, so this could change, but if you write a theory article and submit to AER, there are a half dozen journals you would try after rejection between going to AEJ:Micro.
Economists competitive? Is that really so surprising: remember we're teaching students the joy of competition from day one. It would be weird if we weren't. While it is true that economists have more outside opportunities than Philosophy PhDs, the supply is higher as a result.
As one who has published in other [non-economics] disciplines it is very striking to me that the lags, between submission, and decision [whatever that is] are much longer in economics. This may have something to do with the competition for "top journals". If you get rejected by a couple of journals, that could be a couple of years down the road. Meanwhile, the literature has moved on, new data has emerged, other people are working on the topic.
They're definitely the most insecure. They can name every single Nobel laureate, what year they won it, and what they won it for. They also refer to winners as "Nobel laureate Bla Von Blablawitz." You never see that kind of butt-kissing of trophy-winners in psychologically secure fields — even in the arts.
No one refers to "Grammy Award-winner Michael Jackson" or "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Madonna." That would only be if their work didn't speak for itself; the honorific in that case would deflect questions about their worth.
If there were a Nobel back in his day, and if he'd won it, I think the father of economics would be insulted if others referred to him as "Nobel laureate Adam Smith," as though he were some unknown bozo looking for an entry-level job at Outer Podunk Teacher's College.
From personal experience when your paper is rejected and the reviews are well written and point out true weaknesses of the paper, starting over, restructuring or revising the article usually makes the paper much stronger than in the first place.
The proposal would mean that the paper would be passed along with its weaknesses, does not garantuee acceptance and all of a sudden you sit their with an 7-8 month old article that could have been improved several months earlier. I kind of dislike this idea.
Even when you receive "stupid" reviews like we did for an article submission to political analysis (dont get me started), your are able to benefit from it anyway.
Andrew, why can't you acknowledge that Series B is THE top statistical journal?!?
Ok, I am joking. I agree that there is no hierarchy of the five or six top journals, even though we also distinguish between first and second tier journals (with some margin of error). The point is that statistics has becomed such a fragmented field that we do need the diversity. I would argue we also need to keep some unity "against" other fields infringing upon our marches but I am sure you do disagree.
Actually putting "Nobel laureate" before someone's name [which I think is a bit silly] is not peculiar to Economics. They all do it.
I am not aware of any unusual levels of insecurity in the discipline. Posting anonymously 'though seems a clear sign of insecurity to me.
I don't think economists need defending, so I won't. (Personally I think if there's a problem it's that they're too secure and note that they're too insecure), But when you write something like this:
did you really fail to notice that you had to just go one genre to the side to get
"Three Times Academy Award Nominee Tom Cruise"
or
"Academy Award Winner Forest Whitaker" etc. etc. on every movie add?
As for the Journal referee reports – in general I think this is an interesting idea, but I wonder how this might change incentives for reviewers. Many reviewers spend considerable time in reviews making specific suggestions for improvement. If people won't take these, but just send stuff to the next journal – will referee reports become less helpful?
Rogowski has called a rejection "Like an R&R for the next submission of the article" – that always seemed a reasonable approach to me.
economists are extremely attuned to ranking – of researchers, schools, journals, etc. my guess is that it takes a lot of effort and narrow expertise to figure out if a paper is good, objectively speaking. yet decisions must be made about who to accept/hire/tenure – so you fall back on school rank, extending well-known ideas (leads to lots of fads), and so on. kinda funny since economists are supposed to know all about incentives, yet are stuck with the system
Econ is broken, actually; three of the top four journals are reported to reject any papers which do not follow the neomonetarist orthodoxy. Despite the fact that the neomonetarist orthodoxy was disproven in 2008.
It's actually relativey easy to figure out whether a paper in economics is good, objectively speaking — if you actually practice economics as a empirical subject. A lot of economist practice economic cult membership instead, and everyone *knows* cults love arcane details of ranking.