Chris Blattman

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This helps explain some of my current anxiety level (or 9 new facts about economics publishing)

The first four facts:

  1. Annual submissions to the top-5 journals nearly doubled from 1990 to 2012.
  2. The total number of articles published in these journals actually declined from 400 per year in the late 1970s to 300 per year most recently. As a result, the acceptance rate has fallen from 15% to 6%, with potential implications for the career progression of young scholars.
  3. One journal, the American Economic Review, now accounts for 40% of top-5 publications, up from 25% in the 1970s.
  4. Recently published papers are on average 3 times longer than they were in the 1970s, contributing to the relative shortage of journal space.

A new paper by David Card and Stefano Dellavigna. NBER version here. Link to an ungated copy on Dellavigna’s website here.

In another paper, they look at the impact of reducing page limits in the AER and JEEA. AER submission stay steady, but not so at the JEEA. Their conclusion: “a top-5 journal has substantial monopoly power over submissions, unlike a journal one notch below.”

7 Responses

  1. Aren’t institutions which employ professors arbitraging that and snapping the “value” professors who end up at the top of the second tier?

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