A Century of American Economic Review

Insights on Critical Factors in Journal Publishing

B. Torgler, Marco Piatti

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137333049
• eBook ISBN: 9781137333056
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Business internazionale

By using information collected from numerous American Economic Review publications from the last 100 years, Torgler and Piatti examine the top publishing institutions to determine their most renowned AER papers based on citation success.

1

Introduction

Abstract: Using information collected from American Economic Review publications of the last 100 years, we provide answers to the following questions: Which are the top publishing institutions and countries? Which are the top papers based on citation success? How equally is citation success distributed? Who are the top publishing authors? What is the level of cooperation among authors? What drives the alphabetical name ordering? What are the individual characteristics of the authors, editors, editorial board members, and referees? How frequently do women publish? What is the relation between academic age and publication performance? What influences the technical level of articles? Do connections have an influence on citation success? Can awards increase the probability of publishing at a later stage?

Keywords: authors; awards; connections; cooperation; editors; rankings

Benno Torgler and Marco Piatti: A Century of American Economic Review: Insights on Critical Factors in Journal Publishing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137333056.

Scholarly journals play a crucial role in the communication of scientific knowledge and new ideas. As Anne-Wil Harzing (author of The Publish or Perish Book) points out in a 2002 article, “[a]cademics and practitioners alike turn to academic articles as a reliable source of information” (127). Recently, however, the academic system has become even more competitive, producing a situation in which “graduate students and assistant professors are under extreme time pressure. In some cases, it is an ‘all or nothing’ issue: either they are able to publish in a good refereed journal, or they have to bury their dream of an academic career” (Bruno S. Frey 2005: 178).¹

This book takes a very close look at the American Economic Review (AER), the first journal of the American Economic Association. Created in 1911, AER is one of the top economics journals and has substantially influenced the economics landscape over the last 100 years. Economics journals began emerging a century after Adam Smith’s 1776 publication in Europe of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Arthur W. Diamond 1988). Previously, serious economics were covered only in books or non-specialist periodicals. The first fully professional journal in the US, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, came into being in 1886 (George J. Stigler, Stephen M. Stigler, and Claire Friedland 1995). Two additional US publications that today are leading journals in the field were founded within the next 15 years (AER and then the Journal of Political Economy in 1892). However, as Stigler, Stigler, and Friedland (1995: 332) note, the “birth of the English-language journals slightly lags the development of economics as an academic calling. In the 1890s, there were perhaps a half dozen professorships of economics in Britain and probably no more than two or three dozen in the United States.” Interestingly, at his testimonial dinner (“Remarks” 1941), the first AER editor Davis Rich Dewey explained that when he was invited to undertake the managing editorship of the American Economic Review, he “demurred, partly on the grounds that I did not read easily foreign languages. The chief qualification I possessed was that I had edited the quarterly of the American Statistical Association during its first fifteen years. Fortunately, French and German statistical tables could be easily deciphered. It was far otherwise with the journals conducted by Schmoller and Conrad. I was, however, assured that the Association wished to publish an American economic journal and that my objection was not an outstanding defect” (viii).

The first article in AER, entitled “Some Unsettled Problems of Irrigation,” was published in 1911 by a distinguished female economist, Katharine Coman (1857–1915), who in the early 1880s was the first American woman to become a professor of statistics (Gerard F. Vaughn 2004). During the early 1900s, she also chaired the Department of Economics and was Dean of Wellesley College. Three papers in the first AER issue in 2011 were dedicated as commentaries to Coman’s contribution (see Elinor Ostrom 2011, Gary D. Libecap 2011, and Robert N. Stavins 2011).² According to Dewey, the inaugural issue led to no end of trouble (as quoted in Ann Mari May and Robert W. Dimand 2009), a situation that has been referred to as the Cross/Eaves Controversy.³

Davis Rich Dewey was in charge of managing AER for 30 years (between 1911 and 1940), a longer tenure than any other editor since. In the same testimonial dinner speech, he emphasized his situation at the time: “When I assumed the duties of managing editor, I was past middle age and had settled down to the routine of teaching undergraduate students. I had no graduate students with whom I could soar into distant stratospheres where dynamic principles seem to contradict those which operate upon this lowly earth. Although I had no competency for empyreal flights, I enjoyed and even envied the tales which these aeronautical economists, with their helical ascents, brought back. A few of these are nose-divers as well, and I read with some satisfaction that these nose-divers, in pulling out from the dive, have a rush of blood from the head to the feet and the flyer often blacks out into unconsciousness. In this way you supplemented the pleasures of my later life; and for this I again give you my most hearty thanks” (“Remarks” 1941: vii).

One key task of a new journal is to distinguish itself from those journals already in existence. In addressing this task, Dewey points out, he “had no clear answer, but believed that, if possible, the new Review should serve as a working tool for the hundreds of graduate students who were on their way to becoming teachers of economics; and secondly that the Review should be the organ of the members of the Association rather than the organ of the editors” (“Remarks” 1941: ix).

Since then, AER has had 9 additional editors: Paul T. Homan (1941–51),4 Bernard F. Haley (1952–62), John G. Gurley (1963–8), George H. Borts (1969–80), Robert W. Clower (1981–5), Orley C. Ashenfelter (1985–01), Ben S. Bernanke (2001–4), Robert A. Moffitt (2004–10), and Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg (2011–). Goldberg, who received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1992 and is the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Economics at Yale University, is the first female editor⁵ in AER’s 100-year history, after having been its coeditor between 2007 and 2010. Interestingly, the Johns Hopkins University appears both at the beginning and the end of AER’s century. Robert A. Moffitt (editor from 2004 to 2010) is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Economics at the Johns Hopkins University and has worked at the university since 1995. Davis Rich Dewey was a student at Johns Hopkins of Richard T. Ely,⁶ one of the key driving forces in establishing AER: “For three years I had been a pupil of Dr. Ely at Johns Hopkins University, and it could not be expected that I would reject the blandishments of my enthusiastic teacher. I was a trailer rather than a founder” (“Remarks” 1941: viii).

This present book, however, does not aim to provide a detailed historical overview of AER, not least because A. W. Coats (1969) has developed an excellent historical account of AER’s pre-history and the first period of the journal under the editorial regimes of Dewey, Homan, and Haley (1911–62). Coats’ analysis has also been recently updated and extended by Robert A. Margo (2011) to cover the period from the 1970s to the present. Margo’s account, however, rather than focusing on the editors, explores the expansion of the economics profession and documents, in three figures and two tables, such statistics as the ratio of published-to-submitted manuscripts (1948–06) and the average length of the articles for various years.⁷ He also conducts a citation analysis of articles published in AER from 1960 to 2000⁸ which, interestingly, reveals that “elite citations”⁹ are quite infrequent but did increase over time (influenced by an increase in the 1960s and 1990s). However, he notes: “Although elite citations for the average AER paper were higher for the 2000 cohort than for the 1970 cohort, this is not true if the rates are page standardized. That is the rise in average length is the mechanism through which the increase frequency of elite citation was realized historically. Prospective authors may shudder at the (very) low unconditional acceptance rate, but subscribers can take some comfort in the knowledge that today’s AER is better than their father’s AER in this (admittedly limited) sense” (Margo 2011: 32).

Given that these historical overviews of AER have already dealt with the journal’s development, we have discretionarily selected the topics for this book based on what we ourselves find interesting and what we hope will prove enjoyable for our readers. The selection does not, therefore, aim to provide coherence or historical structure, which lightens the burden of ensuring completeness and helps us maintain a high level of intrinsic motivation. Indeed, as George Loewenstein points out in the introduction to his book Exotic Preferences (2008: xv), “the overwhelming desire to include everything is one of the most destructive motivations in academia, and it applies not only to seminars, but to the choice of chapters for a book of collected works like this one.” As a result, our contribution merely scratches the surface and presents only a sketch – one, however, that we hope is deep or interesting enough to attract the attention of readers in an academic environment suffering from serious congestion on the supply side.¹⁰ We also somehow hope that there is something for everyone in this contribution.

In the spirit of Dewey, this work is perhaps more of a statistical than an economics paper.¹¹ That is, it is descriptive rather than causal and retrospective rather than forward looking. That is, we make little attempt to put forward a mechanism driven by hypotheses that provide a coherent overall description of AER’s development¹² and report rather than synthesize what we believe is interesting in the journal’s history. We would also like to apologize in advance for the copious use of quotes. Having chosen no overall theory on which to base our analysis, we felt it appropriate in a descriptive paper to draw extensively on past descriptions. We also thought that the book needed a personal touch,¹³ although we are aware that this may (somewhat ironically) support the cult of personality, in particular for contributions that are cited extensively (e.g., the work of Paul A. Samuelson and Bruno S. Frey). Awareness of this irony, however, allows us to eventually derive policy implications. That is, with the help of the data, we try to provide the right camera angles, lens effects, and lighting. We also try to script the quotes’ character development so that they optimally shape the book while allowing us to discuss certain AER publications in greater detail. These latter have also been selected in a relatively discretionary manner so that we may relate them to the topics explored.

While putting together this contribution, we avoided the task of thinking about boundaries (e.g., space restrictions) so that we were free to work for our own approval.¹⁴ Providing there is no refereeing system similar to that of a printed journal, it lightens the burden of being forced to intellectually prostitute oneself (Frey 2005).¹⁵ In our case, we believe that the lack of restrictions has been beneficial and has facilitated a relaxed approach to exploring the topics in this book.¹⁶ We also recognize, however, that one may pay a price if the research product is not user friendly. Academia in general has developed into a “battle of attention” based on an overflow of papers produced per year, and economics is no exception. Such proliferation is amply illustrated by the development of IDEAS, the largest bibliographic database dedicated to economics and freely accessible on the Web, which aims to enhance the free dissemination of research in economics (see http://ideas.repec.org/). This repository contained, in January 2011, information on 11,975 institutions, covering 26,852 authors registered with the RePEc Author Service who have authored 593,619 items listed in the archive. In 2010, the information dissemination service NEP (New Economics Papers) sent 4,448 weekly reports about new research based on 87 fields, and the RePEc services recorded 8,989,727 downloads and 30,777,612 abstract views (see http://blog.repec.org/, accessed January 6, 2011). Not only does this level of activity seem to characterize a highly competitive environment, but academics cannot assume or expect that fellow researchers will read a paper that does not use what George J. Stigler (1955: 295) terms the “technique of persuasion.” He explains this technique as follows: “Sup...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Top Institutions, Top Papers and Leading Economists Publishing in AER
• 3  Cooperation, Coauthorship and Alphabetical Name Ordering
• 4  Demographic Characteristics of AER Authors
• 5  AER Editors, Coeditors, and Board Members
• 6  Submission Strategies, Referees, and Awards
• 7  Paper Characteristics
• 8  Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index