Marc F. Bellemare Posts

Serving as one of two editors of Food Policy over the last few years, I have lost count of the number of times I have received a manuscript where it was clear that the authors did not think carefully about the works they were citing. I’m hoping this post will help younger researchers understand the citation economy.

Why do the works you are citing matter? Because unless your manuscript is on a topic I know extremely well and I can immediately think of two or three potential reviewers just by looking at your title or abstract, in most cases, I will start looking for potential reviewers by jumping directly to your references list.

Now, imagine I receive an article on a topic I don’t know much about (say, international trade), and all I see are references to Acemoglu and Robinson this, Acemoglu and Robinson that, Krugman here, and Stiglitz there, and so on.

Moreover, imagine that the articles referenced in the manuscript are almost all in journals like the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, or Econometrica, and no reference is made to articles in Food Policy or its sister journals (e.g., the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Economics, etc.)

For the authors, this is usually a bad citation strategy, for two reasons:

Last spring, I blogged about some work that I had been doing in which my coauthors and I looked at the definition and measurement of food waste.

Given the importance of the topic, I decided to write an op-ed on the topic of food waste. It was published this morning in the Wall Street Journal.

The WSJ article is gated (if you are at a university, you are most likely able to access it through your library’s subscription), but the AJAE article I refer to in my op-ed is free (probably only for a limited time).

I do all of my teaching in the fall, which means that I have spent the last week and am spending this week preparing my teaching for the fall semester.

One of the classes that I teach is the Department’s undergraduate development class, formally titled Microeconomics of International Development.

Because the students in my class have heterogeneous levels of preparation when it comes to econometrics, I have them read two handouts aiming to give them a good intuitive understanding. One is a primer on linear regression, which teaches them how to read a table of regression results. The other is a primer on causality, which teaches them how to question the causal statements they are presented with and discusses a few of the ways causality can be disentangled from correlation. I make both handouts available here given that other instructors of classes relying on quantitative findings might find them useful.

* It should go without saying that I do not think of my students as dummies. But because there’s always someone whose sarcasm detector is broken, I should note that I am merely capitalizing here on the famous “for Dummies” book series…