Maybe not, maybe you just think they are:
Leading papers in a journal’s issue attract, on average, more citations than those that follow. It is, however, difficult to assess whether they are of better quality (as is often suggested), or whether this happens just because they appear first in an issue. We make use of a natural experiment that was carried out by a journal in which papers are randomly ordered in some issues, while this order is not random in others. We show that leading papers in randomly ordered issues also attract more citations, which casts some doubt on whether, in general, leading papers are of higher quality.
Here is the full paper, courtesy of Pluralist Economics Review.
I know that when I need to pull some quotes from a book I didn’t read, I use the random number generator on the ti-83. If you quote from the first section of a book or first few pages of a chapter the prof will know that you didn’t read! Maybe these professional economists should do the same?
I find this to be true about alphabetical ordering. That’s one reason I like my blog’s name (aguanomics). The other reason is that I can now claim to cover A-Z
As a journal editor, I confirm that most of us,
I do in any case, try to put a paper as lead
of an issue that is more interesting than the
others, or most of others. I find it interesting
to see how often my guesses are correct. It
would seem that those leads do tend to get
cited more than others, but there are exceptions,
in both directions, leaders that end up as losers
and papers far down the order that end up getting
cited a whole lot.
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