But by that logic, you should also discount journals that publish more papers per year than others. Otherwise, there are many people who can claim a publication in that journal, and so this "inflates the original ranking of the journal"
Let's just cut the crap altogether.
@d95d and others on sqrt(n):
I never really understood this logic. Suppose you have a journal that is supposed to be good like AER and that journal is assigned a value of 1 as a sign of relative quality. Lesser esteemed journals get a lower ranking value. So let us stick with an AER article with a ranking value of 1.
If the article is single-authored that author gets all the credit. So she/he gets a 1.
If there are two authors then an author-related 1/sqrt(n) means each auther gets credit 1/sqrt(2). Ok. What is the value of the paper in the ranking then? Well, it should be (1/sqrt(2) + 1/sqrt(2)) = 2/sqrt(2). But that is bigger than one. So 'mysteriously' the (aggreagte) worth of the paper is sqrt(2) > 1. But 1 was the ranking relative to all the other journals. In my understanding this inflates the original ranking of the journal in question and the 'worth' of the piece of research in that outlet.
As an aside: Suppose you have 6 authors, then the (aggregate) value of that one piece of research in the AER suddenly becomes sqrt(6) >> 1. And so on for n large.
That does not make sense to me. I am fully aware that there may be huge credit-allocative problem within teams, but an equal sharing scheme seems pretty much ok to many people. Of course, single authors do not have that problem. Turning this around: Single-authored papers get 'deflated' according to the sqrt(n)-rule.
Thanks for the input. I guess the question is what we want to achieve with the ranking. One view is that we want to estimate which impact the individual scientists has on science.
As impact is usual measured by citations but we have citations only many years in the future we use impact factors (average number of citations per paper) of journals. This is basically a prediction of future citations.
Now the challenge is to extract from this prediction of the impact per article, the individual impact of each author. Depending on your production function, e.g. if you assume it is complementary, the sum of marginal impact of each author is larger than the total impact of an article.
Ahmadpoor and Jones in PNAS (2019) have a fantastic paper on how to assign credit in teams. They show a) team work have ex-post much more ex-post impact than single authored papers (i.e. team work is efficient and should count more than the share of average impact) and b) the right way to weigh coauthor contribution is the harmonic mean.
Speaking about RR (I mean revise&resubmit), have you noticed how the recent Dustmann RR paper at QJE on the German min wage fails to cite this published paper that analyses the same policy on the same data, finding different results?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0019793919889635
The funny thing is that the identification strategy of Bossler and Gerner looks also more convincing, at least at face value (firms closer to the threshold rather than labor markets closer to the threshold). I am not saying Dustmann is necessarily wrong, but how come not even mentioning a recent ILRR paper with 100 google cites that is so relevant to what you are doing is just fine for QJE referees?
[...]If there are two authors then an author-related 1/sqrt(n) means each auther gets credit 1/sqrt(2). Ok. What is the value of the paper in the ranking then? Well, it should be (1/sqrt(2) + 1/sqrt(2)) = 2/sqrt(2). But that is bigger than one. So 'mysteriously' the (aggreagte) worth of the paper is sqrt(2) > 1. But 1 was the ranking relative to all the other journals. In my understanding this inflates the original ranking of the journal in question and the 'worth' of the piece of research in that outlet.[...]But by that logic, you should also discount journals that publish more papers per year than others. Otherwise, there are many people who can claim a publication in that journal, and so this "inflates the original ranking of the journal"
No, because the journal weights are typically determined by counting the number of citations per published article.
Speaking about RR (I mean revise&resubmit), have you noticed how the recent Dustmann RR paper at QJE on the German min wage fails to cite this published paper that analyses the same policy on the same data, finding different results?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0019793919889635
The funny thing is that the identification strategy of Bossler and Gerner looks also more convincing, at least at face value (firms closer to the threshold rather than labor markets closer to the threshold). I am not saying Dustmann is necessarily wrong, but how come not even mentioning a recent ILRR paper with 100 google cites that is so relevant to what you are doing is just fine for QJE referees?
This is bad. This paper has been around for ages (I think it was the first German general MW study), so no way they did not know about it.
Speaking about RR (I mean revise&resubmit), have you noticed how the recent Dustmann RR paper at QJE on the German min wage fails to cite this published paper that analyses the same policy on the same data, finding different results?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0019793919889635
The funny thing is that the identification strategy of Bossler and Gerner looks also more convincing, at least at face value (firms closer to the threshold rather than labor markets closer to the threshold). I am not saying Dustmann is necessarily wrong, but how come not even mentioning a recent ILRR paper with 100 google cites that is so relevant to what you are doing is just fine for QJE referees?This is bad. This paper has been around for ages (I think it was the first German general MW study), so no way they did not know about it.
Top journal publications are about connections. If you have connections, you can do a lot of things
Speaking about RR (I mean revise&resubmit), have you noticed how the recent Dustmann RR paper at QJE on the German min wage fails to cite this published paper that analyses the same policy on the same data, finding different results?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0019793919889635
The funny thing is that the identification strategy of Bossler and Gerner looks also more convincing, at least at face value (firms closer to the threshold rather than labor markets closer to the threshold). I am not saying Dustmann is necessarily wrong, but how come not even mentioning a recent ILRR paper with 100 google cites that is so relevant to what you are doing is just fine for QJE referees?This is bad. This paper has been around for ages (I think it was the first German general MW study), so no way they did not know about it.
Top journal publications are about connections. If you have connections, you can do a lot of things
So should we discount top publications then?
Speaking about RR (I mean revise&resubmit), have you noticed how the recent Dustmann RR paper at QJE on the German min wage fails to cite this published paper that analyses the same policy on the same data, finding different results?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0019793919889635
The funny thing is that the identification strategy of Bossler and Gerner looks also more convincing, at least at face value (firms closer to the threshold rather than labor markets closer to the threshold). I am not saying Dustmann is necessarily wrong, but how come not even mentioning a recent ILRR paper with 100 google cites that is so relevant to what you are doing is just fine for QJE referees?This is bad. This paper has been around for ages (I think it was the first German general MW study), so no way they did not know about it.
Top journal publications are about connections. If you have connections, you can do a lot of things
So should we discount top publications then?
I think publications always require networks and it is more difficult to get into those networks the higher you go. So you could argue only good people achieve to make it into these networks.
But the results is that the same paper would easily get rejected if it is from Cottbus and not from Stanford. That is cristall clear.
We can discuss whether there is a better system but I understand why many peole don't want to get into this top 5 or top 10 competition. Getting these publications is a problem of networks and ressources ( travel to conferences) so this should not be the only important thing although it is of course a good indicator.
Regarding HB ranking: When they changed the weights, they downgraded a lot of decent journals to around 0.1 while they left all really crapy journals at 0.025. This is also completely stupid.
Many only read top 5 or top field. If it does not exist there, it does not exist.
Top 5 only neeeds to cite Top field or above QED
This explains why the papers in these journals always promote "innovative" and "new" findings. It is like living in a filter bubble
Many only read top 5 or top field. If it does not exist there, it does not exist.Top 5 only neeeds to cite Top field or above QED
This explains why the papers in these journals always promote "innovative" and "new" findings. It is like living in a filter bubble
This case is academic dishonesty, not simply networks doing networks' stuff in their bubble. The paper is on a policy relevant topic, and there is an earlier decently published contribution that reaches different policy implications using the same data. The most recent paper should at least try explaining why is this the case. Ignoring that article completely should not be allowed by the top ranked journal in the profession
Just curious, can you give examples for dcent journals that are ranked too low now?
I find the field journals in smaller fields systematically undervalued compared to third tier GI and interdisciplinary journals:
JUE: 0.15, ranked a C journal.
JHE: 0.18, ranked a B journal.
JEH: 0.12, ranked a C journal.
All three ranked worse than the Journal of Peace Research, the Journal of Conflict Resolution and the Yale Law Journal.
As a comparison: C&L have all three in the category A (out of AAA). That seems more reasonable to me.
Many only read top 5 or top field. If it does not exist there, it does not exist.Top 5 only neeeds to cite Top field or above QED
This explains why the papers in these journals always promote "innovative" and "new" findings. It is like living in a filter bubble
This case is academic dishonesty, not simply networks doing networks' stuff in their bubble. The paper is on a policy relevant topic, and there is an earlier decently published contribution that reaches different policy implications using the same data. The most recent paper should at least try explaining why is this the case. Ignoring that article completely should not be allowed by the top ranked journal in the profession
I would not speak of "dishonesty" (by the authors), I would suggest that we are facing "weak reveiwers" (who are not aware of the literature in the field).
I hope that the authors will somehow get informed about the article in the ILRR and I totally agree that the authors must then discuss and explain the different results.