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• 3 years - 17 posts - Latest - RSS
• Thread: 64 Goods vs 27 No Goods

1. Economist
   7c54
   

   In no particular order:

   (1) Obsession with solo-authored work. Science is increasingly becoming a team effort.
   (2) Disdain for interdisciplinary work and not reading/citing literature in other fields (health, psychology, CS, neuroscience, etc).
   (3) 4-5 years publication cycles -> strict 2-3 months review deadlines (AER and QJE are getting there).
   (4) Obsession with top-5 journals, which sustain their monopoly and still publish (in some cases) 4 issues a year with 8 papers per issue (compare to other disciplines: weekly top journals with 20-30 papers per issue) while the number of people in the profession is growing every year.
   (5) Obsession with pedigree.
   (6) Mindless bashing other fields within the discipline (eg. macro or lab experiments).
   (7) Observational analyses and dubious instruments -> experimentation (field, natural, lab).
   (8) Conference selection; just let all the grad students present posters as any other scientific discipline does (besides CS).

   You might find some of these suggestions questionable. It's OK.

   3 years ago # QUOTE 22 Jab 10 No Jab !

2. Kirk
   Rep: 1540

   Restored

   3 years ago # QUOTE 4 Jab 1 No Jab !

3. Economist
   4167
   

   1) is a load of hoo-hah. "Team" work is a ridiculous oxymoron, spung on us by ess-jay-double-yew types trying to up the average output of classes of international students, mostly from two countries in Asia.

   Got my fill of this sorry AA-for-non-English-speakers program in engineering. No more for me, thank you very much.

   3 years ago # QUOTE 3 Jab 5 No Jab !

4. Economist
   8c65
   

   I agree with most of these but let's see who can do something about them.

   (1) Unless some schools from each level explicitly announce that they are going to consider all work the same, solo-authored or with 2 co-authors, in hiring and tenure decisions, I don't think this is something that can change gradually. Not impossible but not likely.

   (2) Referees (and editors) should start punishing this. But we are the referees and for us to be able to do this, we should know or read the other field ourselves. A bit difficult unless editors explicitly ask people to mention those points.

   (3) This takes just 1 journal in each tier and category to start doing it. Doable but requires hard-working and risk-taking editors.

   (4) The problem is not top 5 are not publishing enough but the outcome is very discontinuous at top 5 publications. Go from a top 5 to a top field and you may be risking your tenure. So, I agree with the obsession idea. Especially considering tenure review is not undertaken by people far away from the topic, they should be able to give the same assessment irregardless of the journal of the publication.

   (5) We can't pretend it is possible to make everything anonymous. In many choice problems, we are indifferent between lots of options. In that case, of course we need tie-breakers. Nepotism on the other hand is a much bigger problem.

   (6) Well, they should know better than publishing with reduced-form regressions. Seriously, this will happen in any science and it is not harmful unless enough people are taking advantage of any combination of subfields.

   (7) Again, referees and editors are not much different from the authors of those studies.

   (8) I think this is a problem within econometrics people, in other fields I see students presenting in conferences.

   3 years ago # QUOTE 4 Jab 2 No Jab !

5. Economist
   09b7
   

   A lot of stuff in this thread is getting deleted, what gives?

   3 years ago # QUOTE 3 Jab 0 No Jab !

6. Economist
   824f
   

   Corruption in the publication process!

   3 years ago # QUOTE 1 Jab 0 No Jab !

7. Economist
   1a3e
   

   Completely disagree with leaving behind descriptive and observational studies.

   Also macro no giod p.

   3 years ago # QUOTE 7 Jab 1 No Jab !

8. Economist
   89cc
   

   Completely disagree with leaving behind descriptive and observational studies.
   Also macro no giod p.

   Careful, this might get delted. I agree with you observationals studies are valuable as are some descriptive studies. Clearly, they also have limitations but then they are what they are.

   3 years ago # QUOTE 2 Jab 0 No Jab !

9. Economist
   2e62
   

   (1) is garbage. Multi authored "work" is so often and easily abused to provide coauthorship to coauthors who barely contribute. Strongly supporting single authored papers is one way to overcome this trend.

   3 years ago # QUOTE 4 Jab 1 No Jab !

10. Economist
    0164
    

    The OP is wrong on so many levels.

    2 years ago # QUOTE 3 Jab 0 No Jab !

11. Economist
    a73d
    

    (1) is garbage. Multi authored "work" is so often and easily abused to provide coauthorship to coauthors who barely contribute. Strongly supporting single authored papers is one way to overcome this trend.

    That’s why the sciences and engineering are full of imposters and failing. CS especially is really in decline as a field because of the co-authorship epidemic. A discipline requires knowing who is smart, otherwise it fails. Just look at computer science!

    2 years ago # QUOTE 1 Jab 0 No Jab !

12. Economist
    a73d
    

    (1) is garbage. Multi authored "work" is so often and easily abused to provide coauthorship to coauthors who barely contribute. Strongly supporting single authored papers is one way to overcome this trend.

    That’s why the sciences and engineering are full of imposters and failing. CS especially is really in decline as a field because of the co-authorship epidemic. A discipline requires knowing who is smart, otherwise it fails. Just look at computer science!

    On the other hand, solo authorship is the norm in history departments, and that field’s influence and prestige is truly peaking because it is so easy to tell who is the best. Hooray for single authorship!

    2 years ago # QUOTE 2 Jab 1 No Jab !

13. Economist
    a73d
    

    Regarding (2), why cite other fields when we know a priori that all of their “good” ideas were stolen from economics in the first place? Indeed, there is no Nobel prize in math, CS, sociology or engineering. By definition then, no groundbreaking idea can arise from those fields, since it will NEVER produce a Nobel prize.

    Now, if they can convince a bank or rich philanthropist to fund a “Nobel” in their field, well then we may have to to start to take notice.

    2 years ago # QUOTE 1 Jab 3 No Jab !

14. Economist
    4fc3
    

    so we need to avoid mindlessly bashing other field within econ, but then you say we should avoid observational analyses and shift towards experimental?

    2 years ago # QUOTE 2 Jab 0 No Jab !

15. Economist
    9054
    

    The time to review us not the issue. Most good journals have reasonable turnaround times. The problem is that editors have allowed referees to hijack the review process. The review process is a joke. What journals should do is have a page max on reports of maybe 700 words and move to more thumbs up/down reviewing. For empirical papers there are two issues — is this an interesting question and is the paper identified? People can answer that in 2 pages double spaced. This would work against less well known authors that have good ideas but bad execution but it is not clear the editorial process should be a teaching moment.

    2 years ago # QUOTE 3 Jab 2 No Jab !

16. Economist
    b435
    

    OP thinks economics is a science. This wrong assumption led him to absurd conclusions.

    2 years ago # QUOTE 1 Jab 1 No Jab !

17. Economist
    65f9
    

    "Things that economics as a discipline needs to leave behind"

    Duflo, Levitt, and 95% of theorists.

    2 years ago # QUOTE 0 Jab 0 No Jab !

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