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Date: | Tue Jun 26 13:01:08 2007 |
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Listing and ranking journals by various criteria--"AEA equivalent
pages," citations, etc.--has been a common academic enterprise for the
past two decades or so. A few economists have built their reputations
on these exercises. I agree with Professor McCloskey that such rankings
are of dubious scholarly merit, and are toxic when applied to assess the
work of specific economists.
Professor McCloskey is right on the money in suggesting dummy
journals in any sample. I recall such a study in the AEA some time ago
in which economists were asked to indicate how often they consulted
journals. A really rigorous sounding dummy and more
historical/institutional sounding dummy were included in a list of
journals. The historical/institutional dummy did quite badly--almost
nobody indicated that they used. The analytical/theoretical dummy did
better (as I recall) than some actual journals.
I am also concerned about the accuracy of citations as measures of
impact or quality of scholarship. With the concentration of editors and
authors in a relatively small number of universities, and an
understandable bias toward citing the work of known economists, I have
the distinct (but not empirically tested) suspicion that there is a good
bit of quality scholarship that goes uncited. Coupling this with the
omission of HET journals (until recently) from the major citation
service makes citations a particularly thorny issues as the major or
sole criterion for assessing the scholarly value of our work.
On the other hand (there's always the other hand), a proliferation
of journals of unknown quality and peer review standards makes it
possible to publish a lot of stuff (a technical term) that is of dubious
quality--some of it quite bad. This can lead to a mindless "counting
articles" measure with no consideration of the quality of the work.
The only resolution of this issue that I can hazard is not very
imaginative. We can assess the quality of scholarly journal articles by
reading them ourselves, rather than relying on questionable quantitative
substitutes for reading and thought. I have not been able to convince
many of my colleagues that this is a better approach to assessing our work.
Mike Bradley
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