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If you are editor of an Economics journal that seeks to improve and come across a paper entitled "What Makes a Great Journal Great in Economics?", you read it expecting some great recommendations, for example on how to attract great papers, generate good readership that will cite the articles and how to get established authors interested in submitting.
I supposed this is what Chia-Lin Chang, Michael McAleer, and Les Oxley were out to do, and what a disappointment it is. They take Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science citation data, torture it in all sorts of innovative ways and come to the conclusion that for the top 40 journals in Economics, looking at the 2-year impact factor gives a distorted picture. First, how does this answer the question in the title? Second, it is already well known that these impact factors are flawed and only appreciated by publishers. Indeed, they encourage self-citations by journals, whose editors strategically require from authors to cite other articles. The two year window is ridiculously short for Economics. And the choice of journals that are indexed is difficult to follow.
Friday, August 13, 2010
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9 comments:
McAleer has already published 30 working papers this year. Quantity over quality, visibly.
I find it very "a propos" that McAleer gets tagged as bad research here. This fellow is a master manipulator of rankings and has spent his last years 1) writing lots of papers about rankings 2) trying to talk up his own ranking by pushing his papers onto people. Not for example how every one of his papers appears in multiple working paper series, but seldomly get published in journals.
McAleer is a known "self-plagiarizer." Compare his various papers and you will notice that most are copy-and-paste jobs from each other. Contributions in each paper are minimal. No wonder he does not get anything decent published.
On the Godel's Lost Letter blog run by Lipton about the proposed P != NP proof by Deolalikar, probably not correct, but still being fought over, logician Harvey Friedman has proposed that journals should offer a possible process of public refereeing of papers, obviously modeled with what is going on with Deolalikar's. I have posted about it in more detail on Econospeak and think it is an interesting idea.
Rosser, what you suggest is already done in Economics: Economics E-Journal
Hmm, Rosser, isn't that precisely what this blog is doing?
V.,
But people are not putting their papers up officially, and not many people know about this or link to it, despite EL's efforts at advertising. Plus not tied to publishing.
As for E-journal, not my sense of what they do.
Double checked on Economics e-journal. They do this, but it is the only way they do things. The proposal is to offer people both options. As it is, E-journal is a big zero, no ranking, no citations. I see near zero.
I have raised the issue with my publisher, but suspect they will not be interested. My managing editor is not ("like herding cats"), but we shall see. We innovated target articles in economics journals. Maybe we'll be the first to do what Friedman suggests, offer both the standard path and this website stuff.
BTW, the model seems to have broken down, the P != NP debate. There is supposed to be back and forth, but in the last 24 hours Deolalikar seems to have taken down off his website the several versions of his paper, which have come under intense criticism. He is supposedly going to submit it to a journal, the conventional sort. That debate drew in Fields Medals winners, along with oddballs like me. I don't see people of that stature nor the amount of comments (well over a thousand) that have hit the sites on the N != NP stuff over on that e-journal place.
BTW, regarding the specific argument in the post, what is behind the focus on two-year impact factors is the fact that publishers base journal pricing on them. This obviously puts in place all these incentives for editors to play all sorts of games, from pressuring authors to cite papers in their journals, to the more extreme cases of editors publishing in their own journals and massively citing their own papers in the journal, of which there have been some scandalously egregious cases, although the worst have not been in economics.
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