Economists Behaving Badly

That's the title of a paper on economists that publish in predatory journals, published by Wallace and Perry last year and available here. In the abstract they suggest that "A surprising number of authors who are in the RePEc top 5% also published in predatory journals in 2015." 39 journals of the more than 1600 in RePEc are considered predatory, by the way. I don't have the list, but acceptance rates seem pertinent for a discussion of predatory behavior. The authors say in that regard:

Acceptance rates are not available on the homepage for most of the journals in the data set. Just a third of the thirty-nine journals report acceptance rates, and these range from 5% to 62% for 2015. The six journals that report rates between 5% and 25% provide no supporting data. Six others show data on submissions and acceptances on their homepages allowing calculation of acceptance rates that range from 39% to 61%. The other journal reports a 62% rate but no other data are provided.

The interesting part is the number of top publishers (I guess that's one measure of productivity) that do publish in predatory journals. Again from the paper:

The surprise from the data is the large number of highly experienced authors with publications in predatory journals. As previously noted, twenty-seven registered authors are top 5% authors in RePEc. These top 5% authors have 2120 total publications, a mean of 79 publications per author, of which 104, or 4.9%, are in predatory journals.

My guess is that's by mistake. They get an invitation to publish and they do not do the homework on the journal. But, of course, I might be wrong.

What economists do?

Nothing more profound here on the perils of being an economist. And nothing (not in this post, at least) on the interest rate hike (more on that later; it will be announced at 2pm). Just a table I came across from a paper by Card and DellaVigna (see here) on the fields of papers published in the five top mainstream journals.*

The authors suggest that "the relative shares of the different fields are fairly constant over time: theory is the largest field, accounting for about 30 percent of all articles; macro is next (about 20 percent of papers); labor and microeconomics are tied for third (16–17 percent each); and econometrics, IO, and international each account for about 10–12 percent of papers)." However, you can notice (or so it seems visually) that the Lab Experiment field now appears clearly, and that Development, Health, Finance and IO have grown over time. I would prefer to have the graph with the shares of fields.

Perhaps more interestingly the authors note that "papers in Development and International Economics published since 1990 are more highly cited than older (pre-1990) papers in these fields, whereas recent papers in Econometrics and Theory are less cited than older papers in these fields." More experiments, less citation of theory and more citations of development and and international. That's what mainstream economists have been doing. It would be interesting to see what the heterodox ones have been up to in the same period.

* The top five mainstream journals according to the authors are the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies.