Organizations and Markets

Editors, Reviewers, and Academic Judgment

27 August 2006 at 2:52 pm Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Further to Nicolai’s remarks below:

1. Marginal Revolution had a thread a while back about the best economics journal editors. Don’t know of a similar discussion for other disciplines.

2. The suggestion that editors may defer too heavily to reviewers, rather than forming their own, independent judgments of quality, brings to mind a recent exchange between Leland Yeager and David Laband and Robert Tollison on what Yeager called “secondhandism.” Yeager decried the practice of hiring, promoting, and tenuring faculty based only on quantitative measures of output such as journal rankings, citations, and similar metrics. Laband (who specializes in ranking economics journals) and Tollison replied that hiring and promotion committees should rely, not on their own idiosyncratic opinions, but on the “market test.” Here is Yeager, followed by Laband and Tollison, and Yeager again.

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Methods/Methodology/Theory of Science.