Thank you, Alessandro, for your thoughtful comments! Basically, I agree with all of them. Let me just make three minor points: 1) I believe that the fact that the impact factor (IF) of JBES has recently surpassed the one of Ectca has little to do with the editorial orientations of the two journals. Ectca has always published more theoretical papers than JBES but its historical IF was even 4 times larger than the one of JBES. 2) The issue of concentration of power is not related to the so-called top five journals only. Let me go anecdotal here. About 5 years ago, I submitted a paper to a well-reputed econometric journal, say J1. I got two reports by referees, one of them, say R1, raised some issues but it was not so negative. The other referee, say R2, was quite positive and the points that (s)he raised required rather light revisions. Since the paper was rejected, I asked to the associate editor – that I know – the reason why. Surprisingly, the AE told me, in a private correspondence, that R1 indeed suggested a R&R with major revisions and that R2 suggested instead a rejection because “the paper is a follow up of a work published on J2 (a journal with less reputation than J1) and, as such, it cannot be published on J1”. I was really shocked by a motivation that is obviously silly; the profession is full of papers that were published in minor journals – or even systematically rejected – which provided contributions that turned out to be extremely influential later. The seminal paper on cointegration by Clive Granger (rejected by Ectca in 1980, of which a shortened version was published on Economic Notes in the same year) is a notable example. I then submitted the paper to another journal, say J3, which has BTW recently gained a clearly larger IF than J1. The paper was finally published (after benefiting a lot from the comments of two excellent reviewers), and it got an individual IF that is about 3 times larger of the one of J1. Ironically, even J2 has nowadays a larger IF than J1! I don’t think that I was simply unlucky because I hear similar stories from too many talented and reputed colleagues. To cut a long story shortly, my feeling is that the editorial boards of “historical” journals recently tend to behave as the admission committee of a high society golf club rather than as open-minded scientists… 3) Please allow me to go anecdotal here as well. I come from a family of hard scientists and I’m a kind of black sheep, in the sense that I’m the only one that has something to do with “social sciences”, to which economics should belong. Well, to the best of my knowledge, economics is the unique field that has got something as “the top five journals”. All this to say that I cannot fully agree with your statement “There is, of course, concentration of power in our profession. In part, this is unavoidable.” I believe that focusing on the outlet rather than on of the papers themselves is a terrible mistake, which is idiosyncratic of our profession only. I totally agree with your highly esteemed supervisor that a paper published on a top journal with a negligible impact should be negatively evaluated. Instead, we all seem to say: “Oh, (s)he published on a top 5, so (s)he must be good!”. That’s meaningless to me. Finally, let me congratulate for your note on Ectca! Please feel free to share it with us! 😉 Ciao, Gianluca Da: Alessandro Casini <
> Thank you for sharing. Nice article. There is, of course, concentration of power in our profession. In part, this is unavoidable. Alessandro On 3/27/2022 10:24 PM, Gianluca Cubadda wrote:
-- Alessandro Casini ( "> ) Department of Economics and Finance University of Rome Tor Vergata Via Columbia 2 00133 Rome, Italy http://alessandro-casini.com |
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