Tag: publishing

Improving the Quality of Social Science Research in India

Gulzar Natarajan points us towards an excellent paper written by Jacob Greenspon and Dani Rodrik, on who is writing papers in top tier journals today.

Developing country representation has risen fastest at journals rated 100th or lower, while it has barely increased in journals rated 25th or higher.

Click to access a_note_on_the_global_distribution_of_authorship_102521.pdf

Take a look at the table below, and note how developing country authorship has barely budged from 3.5% to 4.4% across the two time periods the authors have chosen to work with.

https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/files/dani-rodrik/files/a_note_on_the_global_distribution_of_authorship_102521.pdf

What is the problem being addressed here? The fact that there isn’t enough representation in the very top tier journals of authors from developing nations.

How might this problem be resolved? In one of two ways: either the current top tier journals figure out a way to have more representation from developing countries, or developing countries start on the (rather long) journey of creating journals that will replace the ones currently at the top.

In his blogpost, Gulzar Natarajan points out nine ways in which both of these solutions might be implemented:

  1. Hire more local Principal Investigators, both for its own sake, but also because of the large positive externalities they will generate
  2. Develop academic consortium(s) such as NBER in developing countries. Gulzar Natarajan uses the example of India, but this could of course be done in many other countries as well
  3. Give more personalized, contextualized lectures in Indian universities
  4. More mentorships
  5. More referees from India in top tier publications, at least for “India” papers. (Note again that Gulzar Natarajan is writing this for an Indian audience, the same applies for other countries)
  6. Create and share data repositories.
  7. Build out better conferences.
  8. Build out more university level tie-ups on an international basis
  9. Build out better Institutional Review Board certifications for local Indian universities.

The author is kind enough to mention the place at which I currently work (the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics) as an Institute which may be able to play a role in furthering this initiative.

We’ve tried to do work on some of the initiatives he has outlined, including building out on mentorships, trying to build out better (and more) university level tie-ups, and one of the few silver linings to the last eighteen months has been the fact that it has never been easier to get professors from the world over to “come” and speak via video conference. But much more – much, much more! – remains to be done.

In an ideal world, each university in India would have a faculty member whose sole full time job it would be to figure out how each university is working on each of these nine points, with some sort of a coordinating agency working with (and across) each participating university. This is, of course, easier said than done.

Its necessity, if you ask me, is indisputable.

Economist Writing Everyday

That’s a blog I came across thanks to MR, and if you’re a student learning about economics, this is very much the kind of blog you should be reading.

Why?

  1. Updated regularly, which should serve as inspiration
  2. Written in an easy, conversational style (ditto)
  3. A lot of interesting blogposts that serve to help you think through concepts you may have learnt recently (students who’ve just embarked on macro might like reading this post, for example)
  4. And a meta point that I’m going to spend the rest of this blog post on, so please continue below the fold 🙂

One post that Tyler Cowen himself linked to in his post on MR was this one, about academic publishing:

There are a lot more people writing academic journal articles.
There is a lot more well-executed economic research.
The teams of co-authors on papers/projects have become much larger.
The number of journals whose prestige is commensurate with a tenured position at an elite school has grown slower than the total faculty employed by elite schools.
Economics research has become more expensive and labor intensive.

https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2021/05/31/academic-publishing-how-i-think-we-got-here/
  1. I’ll get to my thoughts about this in just a bit, but I want to spend a little bit of time in helping you learn how to draw parallels.
    1. Those points noted above, they work just as well if you replace journals with universities, and faculty with applicants.
    2. Further reading, if you’re now suddenly interested in the topic. Also ask yourself if your answer changes depending upon whether you’re in Harvard or not (or have been published in a top-tier journal or not – same thing, for the purposes of this post)
    3. “Where else can this be applied?” is a question that should be front and center when you’re learning a new concept is the larger point I want to make.
    4. So when you learn about the pyramid in publishing, ask if it can be applied to the world of student applications. To, say, the IPL. To, say, becoming a “top lawyer”, or a “top doctor”…. you get the drift.
  2. The rest of the post is a wonderful explanation of how to build a simple model to help you arrive at the equilibrium. More people should learn this skill, and more universities should teach this skill!
  3. The author’s conclusion? More papers should be published by top journals, which is tantamount to saying more students should be accepted by Harvard. Who is right? Mike Makowsky or Tyler Cowen? Why? If your answer is both, what makes student applications different from paper submissions? What a wonderful set of questions to think about!
  4. This blog (not just the blogpost, the blog) gets better from here on in because they’ve published a follow-up post on this topic!
    1. It’s written in “yes, and” style, rather than a “no, but” style, which is a lovely thing to see
    2. It asks this question: “As an academician, what are you optimizing for?” And employing the concept of division of labor, Jeremy Horpedahl argues that if you’re the kind of academician who likes to teach, maybe it’s ok to not be published in a top 5 journal. If you’re the kind of academician who likes to research, on the other hand…
    3. Homework: how does this work in the case of student applications?
  5. And all this from just two posts on the blog! I’ve subscribed, of course, and I would strongly recommend you to do the same.
  6. I’m going to be a little greedy, and give one final recommendation. This post on Identifying Ideas That Motivate You is great reading for young would-be researchers.

Tech: Links for 13th July, 2019

Five articles by Michael Nielsen. If you aren’t familiar with Michael Nielsen, this is a great place to start!

  1. His version of how to write better.
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  2. A scientist’s explanation of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.
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  3. May this come true, and right soon.
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  4. “In the US House of Representatives, 61 percent of Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act, while a much higher percentage, 80 percent, of Republicans voted for the Act. You might think that we could conclude from this that being Republican, rather than Democrat, was an important factor in causing someone to vote for the Civil Rights Act. However, the picture changes if we include an additional factor in the analysis, namely, whether a legislator came from a Northern or Southern state. If we include that extra factor, the situation completely reverses, in both the North and the South. Here’s how it breaks down:North: Democrat (94 percent), Republican (85 percent)

    South: Democrat (7 percent), Republican (0 percent)

    Yes, you read that right: in both the North and the South, a larger fraction of Democrats than Republicans voted for the Act, despite the fact that overall a larger fraction of Republicans than Democrats voted for the Act.”
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    One of my favorite problems from statistics: Simpson’s Paradox. And an old frenemy: correlation is not causation.
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  5. Memory, and how to get better at it.