Posted by Philip Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen, October 6, 2008
excerpt:
Is peer review in decline? Glenn Ellison, an economist at MIT, is beginning to question the added value of being published in top journals, at least for high-ranking authors.
Ellison has painstakingly documented the decline of articles published in top economics journals by authors working in the highest-ranked schools. These authors are continuing to publish, but are seeking other outlets, including unrefereed preprint and working paper servers.
There are several explanations for this trend, and Ellison is careful about not attributing what he has observed to a single theory. Still, there are two explanations that make empirical and theoretical sense:
- The Internet has allowed the certification and dissemination functions of journals to be disaggregated, permitting other services (like preprint and working paper servers), and networked search tools (like Google Scholar), to perform the function of disseminating research findings.
- Any economist will tell you that it is taking more time to get your work published in a top-economics journal. Submission to publication may take years in many cases, and reviewers are more eager to require multiple revisions from the authors. For those economists who have already built a reputation, the benefits of going through the certification process may not be worth the effort, at least not for all of their work.
Since the prestige of a journal is heavily influenced by a small number of influential papers, losing these contributions can be significant in a publishing environment where authors want their work associated with other high-profile authors.
Read the entire post at: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/10/06/the-end-of-peer-review/
