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Category: Miscellaneous

Published January 19, 2012

Krugman on Scientific Publishing and the Peer Review Process

So now we have rapid-fire exchange via blogs and online working papers — and I think it’s all good. Work circulates even faster than it did then, there are quick exchanges that can advance understanding, and while it’s still hard to break in, connections aren’t as important as they once were and the system is much more open.

But, you say, doesn’t this allow a lot of really bad economics to circulate? Yes, but is it really any worse than it used to be? As I’ve tried to explain, the notion of journals as gatekeepers was largely fictional even 25 years ago. And I have a somewhat jaundiced view of how the whole refereeing/publication system has ever worked; all too often, it seems to act as a way for entrenched doctrines to blockade new ideas, or at least to keep people with new ideas from getting tenure at a good school.

The major problem I see now is the disconnect between promotion and the real nature of intellectual discourse in the Internet age. But the quality of the discussion, it seems to me, is if anything higher than it was in the good old days.

That’s Paul Krugman, in a post commenting on the trend toward open science, which the New York Times discussed earlier this week, and which my colleague Don Taylor blogged about yesterday.

Published January 17, 2012

Aid Bloggers’ Best Awards

Tom Murphy, who runs A View from the Cave and is one of the partners running the Development and Aid Workers News Service (DAWNS) Digest — which delivers daily news relevant to development straight your inbox every morning for a very small fee — has opened up nominations for the 2011 Aid Bloggers’ Best Awards (ABBAs).

You can vote here. In case you would like to nominate one of my posts for best post of 2011, my top posts since I started the blog in 2011 (which makes this blog eligible for best new blog) were:

  1. Methodological Convergence in the Social Sciences, in which I discussed the increasingly porous boundaries between disciplines in the social sciences.
  2. Seven Billion People on Earth: Enough with the Fear Mongering, in which I expressed a great deal of skepticism at neo-Malthusian ideas, and which was linked to by Andrew Sullivan.