TOP5ITIS and how to contract it if you are an economist

TOP5ITIS (Pdf)

by Roberto Serrano
Department of Economics, Brown University January 2018

I would call it the Closed Shop in economics. Pretty funny read. To be expected when it is about economists. It gets slightly sleazy with their "incestuous practices" and there might therefore follow an "empoverishment of genetic pools". Does not sound like a catastrophy though, after all, who cares about gene pools of people who happen to be in the know after the event. Still, they seem to have some lofty goals, like "contribute to knowledge of some relevant aspect of the economic reality". Who would have thought that.

Abstract: 

Top5itis is a disease that currently affects the economics discipline. It refers to the obsession of the profession of academic economists with the so-called “top5 journals.” These are, alphabetically, the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies. In its most extreme forms, top5itis reduces the evaluation of a paper to the following test: a paper has any value if and only if it was published by one of the journals in this list. Therefore, in order to evaluate the scientific production of a scholar, a person affected by top5itis simply counts the scholar’s “top5’s.” Since the disease is a simple application of the counting measure (typically a person learns to count in primary school), through a process of contagion, top5itis spreads quickly to affect people outside economics, including schoolchildren offspring of economists who get together in the playground to make disparaging remarks about each other’s parents. With similar patterns, the disease has also spread to competent university administrators and influential granting agencies. 

History. 

The disease is believed to first have appeared in the United States; by now, it has spread to other regions of the world. The date of its first occurrence is unclear, although different scholars place it around the year 2000. ...

Symtoms and consequences. 

It is true that these journals publish some very good papers, but they also publish papers that are not so good, and vice versa, some very good papers are published in other journals. Nevertheless, as is well known, the establishment of any oligopoly has detrimental consequences for welfare, in this case, for the scientific output of the discipline. The next paragraphs describe some examples, along with some of the symtoms of the disease. Some of the top5 journals are especially affected by what Heckman calls the “incest factor” (Heckman et al. (2017)). That is, they publish a high proportion of papers written by scholars affiliated with a very small number of institutions. In some cases as well, incest is also manifested in the editors and referees of those journals. Incestuous practices tend to have implications for the empoverishment of genetic pools. When it comes to scientific production, this may result in suppressing originality or heterogeneity of ideas or approaches.

[True story number 1. Some of the people infected with top5itis do not see this as a problem; on the contrary, an economist who suffers the disease confesses that s/he would be proud of belonging to those incestuous clubs.] 

Some editors and referees turn top5itis into an axiom of their behavior: 

[True story number 2. An editor made the following blanket statement: “this contribution is not of general interest, and therefore, it does not belong in a top5.”] Notice that the first part of the statement should be respected, as it is the expression of an opinion, and typically, editors of these journals are proven scholars whose opinions should carry much weight. The problem is the second part of the statement, making an assertion that effectively places the editor as rejecting the paper not only for his/her journal, but for four other journals as well. That is evidence of some serious confusion on the part of that editor regarding the scope of the decision s/he is making. ...

...

[True story number 9. An economist near retirement confessed that the first thing s/he did every morning was to check two numbers: the number of his/her citations and the value of his/her retirement fund. The good thing about the former was that it never went down.]

 [True story number 10. An economist suggested that, in order to increase citations, all papers should add a new section. After the “Related Literature” section, all papers should close with the “Unrelated Literature” section.] 

Good to know that help is possible if they only get their act together.

4. Treatment.

[This entry needs to be completed.]

The goal of the academic economist should be to contribute to knowledge of some relevant aspect of the economic reality. The profession should reflect on whether the practices described above are conducive to that worthy goal.

In case you have the stomach and endurance, here is the webcast.