fact: are you a female ap at a top place needing pubs to build tenure case? Aer (I.e., hh) and if not aej (ed) will be there to help !
New "Family Ruptures" AER / NBER is rip-off of obscure paper
-
I think the authors do not deserve much blame here, perhaps they should have seen this article. It seems pretty obscure to me and its not 100% clear in my opinion what cross-disciplinary publications should be cited (had they known of this article, i agree they should have cited it).
I am surprised it is AER material though.I totally disagree. If a paper like this (which is mostly non econ related) is going to be published in a top econ journal then it has to cite all relevant cross-disciplinary publications otherwise we are going to get a lot of people scouring the far reaches of non-econ research and copying those papers to then publish then in the AER. But above all this is the editor's and referee's fault because it is painfully obvious that they don't know s**t about this literature and were not capable of providing a proper review for this paper. This level of incompetence leads to people being fired and sued for damages in the real world.
-
If you look in google scholar with the following key words:
prenatal maternal exposure adverse pregnancy swedenthe first hit is the health paper. The first! This was also my first try (not outrageous given the paper title and topic). Very hard to imagine that they were not aware of this paper.
Personally I like the AER paper (soft spot for health econ) but that does not mean that the paper they failed to cite is "very" close to what they do and should be cited.
-
it even works without "sweden"
If you look in google scholar with the following key words:
prenatal maternal exposure adverse pregnancy sweden
the first hit is the health paper. The first! This was also my first try (not outrageous given the paper title and topic). Very hard to imagine that they were not aware of this paper.
Personally I like the AER paper (soft spot for health econ) but that does not mean that the paper they failed to cite is "very" close to what they do and should be cited. -
^ If you even search "prenatal stress child outcomes sweden" it is on the first page of results. Dropping "Sweden" makes it tougher to find but only because there is a huge literature on the topic of prenatal stress.
The bigger problem is that none of the articles of this topic are in econ journals. I like much of Petra's work, but why is this particular paper in the AER? There is no direct evidence that economic stress affects child outcomes, nor is there evidence that prenatal stress is particularly damaging to outcomes compared to other adverse events during childhood. The paper is, then, essentially just a medical paper, only one written by authors who do not know the medical lit, are not trained in that lit, and who do not make reference to heavily cited articles on very similar articles in that lit.
-
The probability of independence among two publication with common results is inversely proportional to (1) the time separation between the two publications and (2) a time trend. This is, in the Eighteenth century it was common to have independent discoveries. In 2016 it is not longer the case.
Another example of bad practices in economics. See New Scientist article here: http://cort.as/fU6V. It's time to stop this badly design incentive system in the profession.
-
No I mean have they lifted stuff wholesale from the first paper?Is there any evidence of direct plagiarism?
You mean like surveillance footage of clandestine meetings between the authors in which they discuss their deception?That is not the allegation, as you well know.
-
Understanding their contribution is also complicated by the AEJ paper by Black, Devereux, and Salvanes that looks at the exact same question in Norway and does not find effects on adult outcomes. The AEJ certainly came out first. Why does one get into AER and the other AEJ?
Black et al. describe the AER paper as follows:
"Most closely related to our own work is work done concurrently by Persson and Rossin-Slater (2014), who look at the death of a family member in utero on the short- and
long-run health outcomes of children in Sweden. Using a similar identification strategy comparing children in utero for the death of a close family member to those who experience a similar death immediately after birth, the authors find that in utero exposure to stress through the death of a family member affects health at birth and later psychological conditions. While we use a slightly different identification strategy, examining only the death of grandparents of the child in utero to avoid any
other confounding factors associated with the death, such as changes in resources,
we view this paper as a complement to our own—despite their finding of longer run
effects on mental health, we find no significant effects on education or future labor
market success." -
Is there any evidence of direct plagiarism?
You mean like surveillance footage of clandestine meetings between the authors in which they discuss their deception?
No I mean have they lifted stuff wholesale from the first paper?
That is not the allegation, as you well know.
I don't know that I am just asking, "rip-off" can have a number of interpretations. I only asked to clarify whether this was or wasn't the case.
-
I don't know that I am just asking, "rip-off" can have a number of interpretations. I only asked to clarify whether this was or wasn't the case.
"Someone else already found an effect, just go in and re-do it in the usual economics style, add some robustness checks and new outcomes"
OP's post clearly defines what does the rip-off mean here, do you have severe problems with reading comprehension?
-
OP good. Looks suspicious. Wouldn't be the first time that an HRM didn't cite something on purpose when it isn't convenient. The big guys in my field don't cite me (or others) in our narrow literature b/c the implications of my research complicates their identification strategy, even though I know they know about it. (And/or they look down their noses at my research, but you could cite work you don't agree with...) You can ignore work when you are HRM.
BTW, I once lost a split decision at the AER when a referee called me out for not citing a tangentially related paper from the early 1980s, and the editor mentioned the missing citation in her report. (Nevermind that I referred readers to a lit review of this literature which included that paper...)
OP, how did you discover?
-
Ok so someone claims a contribution that they didn't make, either because of incompetence or because they're lying. What do we do about it? Is this worse, for example, than a coding error like that made by Levitt in the abortions and crime paper? To me it seems just as bad.