Are Leading Papers of Better Quality? Evidence from a Natural Experiment
Abstract
Leading papers in a journal’s issue attract, on average, more citations than those that follow. It is, however, difficult to assess whether they are of better quality (as is often suggested), or whether this happens just because they appear first in an issue. We make use of a natural experiment that was carried out by a journal in which papers are randomly ordered in some issues, while this order is not random in others. We show that leading papers in randomly ordered issues also attract more citations, which casts some doubt on whether, in general, leading papers are of higher quality.Download Info
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Paper provided by ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles in its series Working Papers ECARES with number 2008_014.Length: 16 p.
Date of creation: 2008
Date of revision:
Publication status: Published by:
Handle: RePEc:eca:wpaper:2008_014
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Related research
Keywords:Other versions of this item:
- Tom Coupé & Victor Ginsburgh & Abdul Noury, 2010. "Are leading papers of better quality? Evidence from a natural experiment," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 62(1), pages 1-11, January.
- Tom Coupé & Victor Ginsburgh & Abdul Noury, 2008. "Are leading papers of better quality? Evidence from a natural experiment," Discussion Papers 9, Kyiv School of Economics.
- Tom Coupé & Victor Ginsburgh & Abdul Ghafar Noury, 2009. "Are Leading Papers of Better Quality? Evidence from a Natural Experiment," ULB Institutional Repository 2013/99299, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
- NEP-ALL-2008-10-21 (All new papers)
- NEP-CBE-2008-10-21 (Cognitive & Behavioural Economics)
- NEP-EDU-2008-10-21 (Education)
- NEP-EXP-2008-10-21 (Experimental Economics)
- NEP-HPE-2008-10-21 (History & Philosophy of Economics)
- NEP-SOG-2008-10-21 (Sociology of Economics)
References
References listed on IDEASPlease report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
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- Ayres, Ian & Vars, Fredrick E, 2000. "Determinants of Citations to Articles in Elite Law Reviews," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 29(1), pages 427-50, January.
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Citations
Blog mentions
As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:- Lead papers are not particularly better
by Economic Logician in Economic Logic on 2009-03-09 12:21:00
RePEc Biblio mentions
As found on the RePEc Biblio, the curated bibliography for Economics: Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Journée, Michel, 2010. "Generalized power method for sparse principal component analysis," Open Access publications from Université catholique de Louvain info:hdl:2078.1/33456, Université catholique de Louvain.
- Ho Fai Chan & Bruno S. Frey & Jana Gallus & Benno Torgler, 2013.
"Does The John Bates Clark Medal Boost Subsequent Productivity And Citation Success?,"
QuBE Working Papers
004, QUT Business School.
- Ho Fai Chan & Bruno S. Frey & Jana Gallus & Benno Torgler, 2013. "Does The John Bates Clark Medal Boost Subsequent Productivity And Citation Success?," CREMA Working Paper Series 2013-02, Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA).
- Ho Fai Chan & Bruno S. Frey & Jana Gallus & Benno Torgler, 2013. "Does the John Bates Clark Medal boost subsequent productivity and citation success?," ECON - Working Papers 111, Department of Economics - University of Zurich.
- Oswald, Andrew J., 2008. "Can We Test for Bias in Scientific Peer-Review?," IZA Discussion Papers 3665, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
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