Saturday, July 14, 2018

What's in a Journal Name?

Back in 2011 I put together a very light-hearted working paper titled, What's in a (Journal) Name? Here's the associated link.

That paper addressed the (obviously) important question: "Is there a a correlation between the ranking of an economics journal and the length of the journal's title?"

I analyzed a sample of 159 academic economics journals. Although there was no significant association between journal quality and journal title length for the full sample of data, I did find that there was a significant “bathtub” relationship between these variables when the data were subjected to a rank correlation analysis over sub-samples. 

This led me to conclude (p.5),among other things:
'This “bathtub” relationship will undoubtedly sound alarm bells in the corridors of publishing houses as they assess proposals for new economics journals. The title, Economics, is no longer available, having been cunningly snapped up in recent years by an open-access, open-assessment e-journal which managed to “cover all of the bases” in one fell swoop. Even more recently the American Economics Association laid claim to the titles Macroeconomics and Microeconomics, albeit with an “AEA” prefix that they may wish to re-consider. The publishers of the journal, SERIEs: Journal of the Spanish Economic Association, which was launched in 2010, will no doubt ponder the merits of dropping the last six words of its title. However, there is hope. The title Econometrica has been spoken for since 1933, but to the best of our knowledge the more worldly journal title Econometrics is still available. Publishers should register their interest forthwith!'
As usual the latter remark proved to be safe advice on my part! I wonder if my subsequent invitation to join the Editorial Board of Econometrics was some sort of reward? 

I'll probably never know!

© 2018, David E. Giles