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>Colleagues: A graduate student has asked me whether there are any 
>studies in the history of economic thought literature of the refereeing 
>process for professional journals. 
 
        Did you (or your student or anyone) see "Trends in Multi-Authored 
Papers in Economics" by John Hudson in the latest JEP (Summer 1996, Volume 
10, Number 3)? Though the article itself does not directly address the 
refereeing process for professional journals, some of the references might. 
        The analysis in this article does address "economics of economics" 
(very reflexive, raising all kinds of "trouble" ... see "The Sociology of 
Scientific Knowledge" by D. Wade Hands in "New Directions in Economic 
Methodology," edited by Roger Backhouse, London: Routledge, 1994). In fact, 
the economics of publication is one of the few places in "economics of 
science" where there is a fairly rich and well-developed literature. Should 
you (or your student or anyone else) be interested, here are some 
references, some of which deal with the refereeing process and most of 
which deal with other "sciences": 
 
        (1) Journals and books as topics in industrial organization: 
 
Berg, Sanford. 1972. "An Economic analysis of the Demand for Scientific 
Journals," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 
(**):23-27. 
 
Eisenstein, Elizabeth. 1979. "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change." 
New York: Cambridge University Press. 
 
Machlup, Fritz. 1962. "The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the 
United States." Princeton: Princeton University Press. 
 
Machlup, Fritz and Leeson, K. 1980. "Information through the Printed Word." 
New York: Praeger. 
 
Ordover, Janusz & Willig, Robert. 1978. "On the Optimal Provision of 
Journals qua Sometimes Shared Goods," American Economic Review, (68): 
324-338. 
 
        (2) How differing social structures of science and differing 
economic/cost structures lead to different forms of scientific journals 
(charges, authorship, refereeing, rejection): 
 
Barton, Henry. 1963. "The Publication Charge Plan in Physics Journals," 
Physics Today, June,(16):45-57. 
 
Beyer, Janice. 1978. "Editorial Policies and Practices among Leading 
Journals in Four Scientific Fields," Sociological Quarterly, (19):68-88. 
 
Chubin, Daryl E. and Hackett, E. 1990. "Peerless Science." Albany: SUNY 
Press. 
 
Cicchetti, Domenic. 1991. "The Reliability of Peer Review for Manuscript 
and Grant Submissions," Behavioral and Brain Sciences, (14): 119-186. 
 
Cole, Stephen, Cole, Jonathan R., and Simon, Gary A. 1981. "Chance and 
Consensus in Peer Review," Science, (214):881-886. 
 
Hargens, Lowell L. 1988. "Scholarly Consensus and Journal Rejection Rates," 
American Sociological Review, (53):139-151. 
 
Hargens, Lowell L. 1990a. "Neglected Considerations in the Analysis of 
Agreement among Journal Referees," Scientometrics, (19):91-106. 
 
Hargens, Lowell L. 1990b. "Variation in Journal Peer Review Systems: 
Possible Causes and Consequences," Journal of the American Medical 
Association, (263): 1348-1352. 
 
        (3) The potential impacts of electronic publication upon the 
publishing industry and upon science: 
 
Day, Colin. 199x. "The Economics of Electronic Publishing: Some Preliminary 
Thoughts" ... [e-mail [log in to unmask] for exact reference] 
 
Nunberg, Geoffrey. 1993. "The Place of Books in an Age of Electronic 
Reproduction," Representations, (42):13-37. 
 
        Enjoy! If the moderator will allow me to advertise, Philip Mirowski 
and I are organizing a conference on "The Need for a New Economics of 
Science" that will address some of these issues. As a reminder, the 
deadline for proposals is September 30. Please check out 
http://www.nd.edu:80/~econsci for more information or send an e-mail to 
[log in to unmask] 
 
                        --Esther-Mirjam Sent 
 
 
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