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Date: | Mon Oct 1 13:34:33 2007 |
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Samuel Bostaph wrote: "Back when I bothered to read the AER, I did get
tired of articles that began with an assertion that the article was
intended to be "seminal," when what was being presented owed more to
Onan than to George Borts"
Economists are not known for their modesty. Nonetheless, a quick search
on JSTOR, looking at the 20 most recent articles in the AER to use the
word "seminal" and, because I don't know when Samuel Bostaph stopped
reading the AER, another 10 from 1996, finds not a single one in which
an author declares that he or she intends his or her own article to be
seminal. In 100 percent of the cases examined, it is a reference to the
work of others. And among the cases where I personally knew the papers
cited -- sometimes they were far from my own interests, so it is hard to
judge -- the papers were genuinely ones that had been the font of
substantial further work, suggesting that the cited papers were
appropriately described as fruitful ancestors and were not masturbatory
dead ends.
Kevin Hoover
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