LIKE most academics, economists are obsessed with how many research papers they produce, and where they are published. A new paper by James Heckman and Sidharth Moktan from the University of Chicago shows why—and why that might not be good for the profession.
The authors analyse the career paths and publication records of researchers at 35 highly regarded economics departments in America. They consider the impact on tenure decisions of publications in different journals, assuming that they are cited the same number of times. Young academics who had three papers published in what are universally regarded as the top five journals were nearly five times as likely to gain tenure in a given year as those with papers in less prestigious journals. A single publication in the top five nearly doubles the chance. The impact of a top-five publication is weaker for women, which means they need more publications for the same outcome—though the authors warn that their sample includes only a few women, and…
