My post earlier this year, titled “Quality vs. Quantity in Publishing,” has made waves, apparently. Colleagues as far as Asia, Europe, and Latin America have told me they brought it to the attention of grad students under their supervision.
I have never been under any illusion that my research would influence policy—a belief which has only become stronger these past eight months—and so it is good to know that what I write might at least have an influence on my chosen profession.
Unfortunately, from what I hear and from some of the comments I saw on LinkedIn, where many of us have now retreated,1 it seems some people took a descriptive discussion of the trade-off between quality and quantity in publishing as a green screen on which to project their insecurities.
As far as I can tell, there was nothing offensive about my describing the quantity approach to being a successful agricultural and resource economist in my earlier post. As I wrote then, quantity has a quality all of its own, and with a greater quantity of articles comes a significantly greater likelihood that a high-quality article will emerge. The only thing I could maybe see as controversial if I squint hard enough was when I wrote that if a department wants to go up the rankings, it should invest in quality rather than quantity. But then again, I don’t know why that’s controversial because, well… just look around for proof.
(In what follows, I will be using originality to differentiate between a high- vs. low-quality article, ceteris paribus. It will soon become obvious why I do that.)
But there is one rather pernicious way in which quantity is a decreasingly useful strategy for success.
With the advent of and constant improvement in generative AI, the returns to quantity will decrease significantly, and the returns to quality will increase significantly.
What I mean by this is that thanks to generative AI, the quantity of unoriginal-but-competently-done-and-written articles will explode. To take an example I know well, there will be many more ho-hum articles looking at the “effects” of participation in contract farming on income with shaky identification strategies.
(This assumes that generative AI cannot come up with original and interesting research ideas on its own, something I believe will remain true for a good long while.)
As a result, we are likely to witness the academic equivalent of Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” strategy. Journals will see a firehose of unoriginal-yet-competently-done-and-written articles, and their editors (or their own algorithms) will not be able to tell the difference between unoriginal-yet-competently-done-and-written articles written by generative AI and submitted by unscrupulous authors on the one hand and unoriginal-yet-competently-done-and-written articles written by authors who submit their own work.
So what happens then? Journal editors will have to come up with a means of choosing what gets published that goes beyond whether an article is competently done and written well. And what they will use as a rationing device is likely to be whether a research question is original and interesting. In other words, they will look for whether something is of good quality since, in a world where everything is written well and competently done, originality will be the only mark of authenticity—and thus of quality.
My point is this: If I were a graduate student these days, not only would I choose not to do development economics, but I would also make triply sure that I invest in quality rather than quantity. Because many academics become obsolete as soon as they defend their dissertations, this might require bucking the advice of many advisors, but the payoff will in all likelihood be worth it.
- Twitter long ago lost its usefulness to academics, and Bluesky never had any, because it turns out that the thing that is most hated about Twitter—its algorithm—is the thing that made everyone love Twitter in the first place. It’s almost as though there is money to be made selling outrage. More seriously, going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a right-wing Charybdis to a left-wing Scylla, and the last thing I want (or need) in my life are more polarized and polarizing viewpoints. But if you can get past hollow congratulations on your work anniversary, LinkedIn is a good way to share professional stuff. ↩︎