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Are Leading Papers of Better Quality? Evidence from a Natural Experiment

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  • Tom Coupé
  • Victor Ginsburgh
  • Abdul Ghafar Noury

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.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles in its series Working Papers ECARES with number 2008_014.

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Length: 16 p.
Date of creation: 2008
Date of revision:
Publication status: Published by:
Handle: RePEc:eca:wpaper:2008_014

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References

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  1. William J. Moore & Robert J. Newman & Peter J. Sloane & Jeremy D. Steely, . "Productivity Effects of Research Assessment Exercises," Departmental Working Papers 2002-15, Department of Economics, Louisiana State University.
  2. Victor A. Ginsburgh & Jan C. van Ours, 2003. "Expert Opinion and Compensation: Evidence from a Musical Competition," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 93(1), pages 289-296, March.
  3. 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.
  4. Oswald, Andrew J., 2006. "An Examination of the Reliability of Prestigious Scholarly Journals: Evidence and Implications for Decision-makers," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 744, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
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Blog mentions

As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
  1. 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:
  1. > Economics Profession > Ranking in Economics > Ranking Articles and Papers
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Cited by:
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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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  1. Economic Logic blog

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