The Effects of Publication Lags on Life‐cycle Research Productivity in Economics

Abstract

We investigate how increases in publication delays have affected the life cycle of publications of recent Ph.D. graduates in economics. We construct a panel dataset of 14,271 individuals who were awarded Ph.D.s between 1986 and 2000 in U.S. and Canadian economics departments. For this population of scholars, we amass complete records of publications in peer-reviewed journals listed in the JEL (a total of 368,672 observations). We find evidence of significantly diminished productivity in recent relative to earlier cohorts when productivity of an individual is measured by the number of AER-equivalent publications. Diminished productivity is less evident when the number of AER-equivalent pages is used instead. Our findings are consistent with earlier empirical findings of increasing editorial delays, decreasing acceptance rates at journals, and a trend toward longer manuscripts. This decline in productivity is evident in both graduates of top 30 and non-top 30 ranked economics departments and may have important implications for what should constitute a tenurable record. We also find that the research rankings of top economics departments are a surprisingly poor predictor of the subsequent research rankings of their Ph.D.s graduates. (JEL A11, J24, J29, J44)

The Earnings and Consulting Income of US Health Economists: Results from the 2012 Survey of the American Society of Health Economists

“…Recent studies have found that the research productivity of economists is highly concentrated. The top 20 percent of publishing economists produce 80 percent of the quality-adjusted journal articles (Conley et al 2013) and 30-40 percent of the PhD recipients in even the top tier of economics departments have zero publications after six years (Conley andÖnder 2014).…”

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“…Based on a similar observation in other fields (e.g., Seglen ; Verma ), the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessmen t recommends that journal‐based metrics such as journal impact factors should not be used “...as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist's contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.” But to the extent, as noted by Hamermesh (, 141), that “[a] very few outliers determine our perceptions of journal quality,” the incentive effects of total citation count identified here is plausible so long as we implicitly or explicitly weight citations in journals as in Amegashie () and Conley et al ().…”

“…A different but equivalent approach is to assume that a citation in the high‐quality journal is equivalent to r 1 / r 2 ≥ 1 citations in the low‐quality journal. This quality‐adjusted citation of Paper 1 relative to Paper 2 is akin to the approach in Amegashie (), Bodenhorn (), Conley et al (), and Kenny and Studley (). In this case, articles in high‐quality journals need not garner more citations than articles in low‐quality journals but citations in high‐quality journals are given a bigger weight.…”

“…Based on journal quality indices in Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos (), Conley et al () define an American Economic Review (AER) equivalent publication as the number of publications in a journal that is equivalent to one publication in the AER. See Hamermesh () and Oswald () for a discussion of the limitations of this approach.…”

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“…Research productivity of publishing graduates has an extremely skewed distribution, as documented in detail for a larger sample of graduates by Conley et al (2012). Therefore publication data have more than one single dimension to consider, and these figures should be seen as merely descriptive statistics.…”