> Hmm, again maybe. It’s certainly a big shock when you publish in a mainstream science journal and reviews come back within a week.
That is a separate issue. Again see bit.ly/unjournal -- we need more meaningful continuous feedback and rating, and less of the 'wait and waste' parts of the journal game.
But we need 'slower' more careful, larger-scale incremental social science imo. That has nothing to do with 'waiting 6 months for a rejection/acceptance from a journal.'
That seems low. Career incentives are much higher. But glad I don't have to worry about this any more. Academics talk about money and salaries a lot more than I thought they would
it occurs to me that one simple change would be to have a limit of say 8 years or 12 years as a reviewer for the top journals (with no ability to jump journals among the top). or perhaps instead a number of years after PhD cutoff. Just to keep the field moving faster. Only focusing on the top journals would avoid any reduction in quality, since there will still be plenty of super qualified reviewers that fit the criteria
So the incentives in economics at German universities designed to achieve the following goals (below Mannheim and Bonn): a) generate third party funding b) generate third party funding c) generate thrid party funding d) reach out to the public aka Twitter your opinion and e) publications, not necessarily innovative but in your "field", so that you can claim that you are "einschlägig". As third party funding mainly is awarded mainly on promises to deliver publishable and "relevant" outcomes, that can often not be kept due to the very nature of innovative research, this system creates perverse incentives. The incentives seem to be pretty much the same for all disciplines. The problem is that in the third party funding game, economists employ more rigorous standards (as they do for publication) as other social science disciplines, implying that there is less funding for rigorous research and more for less rigorous research in other social science disciplines, that have it far easier to claim to deliver output and get through with it. So there should be more imperialism also at the funding level, so that researchers from different disciplines who claim to resolve similar questions with their respective methodology actually should be evaluated to the same standards. So a sociologist should not get through with promises, an economist does not dare to make.
> To sum up, there should be fewer social scientists, producing less.
I agree with the latter -- produce less, produce better, make it more readable, make it an organized continuously improved project rather than a disorganized vomiting of papers snuck into journals.
If even *one* paper from a typical academic economist's CV actually definitively showed what it claims to, it would be a huge boost to humanity.
But not *fewer* social scientists. We need *more*: to be able to do the sort of carefully checked, replicable/replicated well-justified and well-explained work that we need.
> Are we too slow?
> Hmm, again maybe. It’s certainly a big shock when you publish in a mainstream science journal and reviews come back within a week.
That is a separate issue. Again see bit.ly/unjournal -- we need more meaningful continuous feedback and rating, and less of the 'wait and waste' parts of the journal game.
But we need 'slower' more careful, larger-scale incremental social science imo. That has nothing to do with 'waiting 6 months for a rejection/acceptance from a journal.'
> 4-figure bonuses for a top five publication
That seems low. Career incentives are much higher. But glad I don't have to worry about this any more. Academics talk about money and salaries a lot more than I thought they would
it occurs to me that one simple change would be to have a limit of say 8 years or 12 years as a reviewer for the top journals (with no ability to jump journals among the top). or perhaps instead a number of years after PhD cutoff. Just to keep the field moving faster. Only focusing on the top journals would avoid any reduction in quality, since there will still be plenty of super qualified reviewers that fit the criteria
So the incentives in economics at German universities designed to achieve the following goals (below Mannheim and Bonn): a) generate third party funding b) generate third party funding c) generate thrid party funding d) reach out to the public aka Twitter your opinion and e) publications, not necessarily innovative but in your "field", so that you can claim that you are "einschlägig". As third party funding mainly is awarded mainly on promises to deliver publishable and "relevant" outcomes, that can often not be kept due to the very nature of innovative research, this system creates perverse incentives. The incentives seem to be pretty much the same for all disciplines. The problem is that in the third party funding game, economists employ more rigorous standards (as they do for publication) as other social science disciplines, implying that there is less funding for rigorous research and more for less rigorous research in other social science disciplines, that have it far easier to claim to deliver output and get through with it. So there should be more imperialism also at the funding level, so that researchers from different disciplines who claim to resolve similar questions with their respective methodology actually should be evaluated to the same standards. So a sociologist should not get through with promises, an economist does not dare to make.
And I would come to hear that keynote!
I can argue about the rate of replication in economics, but everything else is spot on.
> To sum up, there should be fewer social scientists, producing less.
I agree with the latter -- produce less, produce better, make it more readable, make it an organized continuously improved project rather than a disorganized vomiting of papers snuck into journals.
But you know what I think about [THIS](bit.ly/unjournal)
If even *one* paper from a typical academic economist's CV actually definitively showed what it claims to, it would be a huge boost to humanity.
But not *fewer* social scientists. We need *more*: to be able to do the sort of carefully checked, replicable/replicated well-justified and well-explained work that we need.