I received my third one Friday and it is called Economic Policy. A few weeks ago I received a macro journal and another journal which I can no longer remember the theme of (micro maybe?). In case you don't know these multiple journals have supplemented the one-size-fits-all American Economic Review, which was a single issue every three months.
I don't intend any criticism of the editors, as it seems (based on a mere perusal) they have done a good job in each case. But the coming of the American Economic Review was for me an event to look forward to. Now it feels like a bunch of journals are crossing my desk and I wish to be done with them. If they are going to expand, I would rather get just one more additional journal. Maybe it's not actually an advantage that they can publish more articles; somehow they all seem less important and I feel as if the real quantity of research — defined in part by its salience to a broad community — has gone down.
Are they really going to replace the AER by these journals, or are these journals published on top of the AER ?
These are new journals. AER will still exist. I think this is for stuff almost, but not quite, good enough for AER.
Funny you should mention these. I carefully keep every issue of every journal I subscribe to (Econometrica, AER, JEL, JEP, etc.), yet I just threw away these three when cleaning my desk earlier this morning.
The AEJ: Applied Micro was especially uninteresting, given that well over 90 percent of what was in there was seemingly atheoretic and involved either a natural experiment, a cute instrument, or a randomized control trial.
The quantity of research economists has probably grown several fold more times in the past three decades than the capacity of journals to publish articles. These new journals, which I think are helpful, are likely just a case of specialization moving to match the extent of the market.
The big mistake was to not expand AER to a monthly journal. As the size of the profession and the quality of the research has increased, it would be natural to expand the number of journal articles. But perhaps those who decided the policy of three journals did not want to dilute the value of their capital (previous publications in AER).
You’ll only get one of each (4 new journals in total) unless you subscribe. So no worries, you won’t have to toss these again. I feel the same way.
Thanks for noting this, Tyler. This is what finally pushed me over the margin and motivated me to end my membership in AEA. In this Google age, one of the main benefits of being in the AEA, making it easier for other economists to find me, has fallen to close to zero. And of course I can read all the journals on line. (Unlike you, and possibly unwisely, I had quit reading AER years ago. The only one I liked was JEP.)
I’m glad I’m not the only one who was bothered by the use of perusal here. A sad case of a misuse becoming so common it finds its way into the dictionary.
As someone unofficially privy to what has gone on with these new journals,
what motivated the setting up of them was the longstanding annoyance by
a number of leading economists, some of them now in high positions of the
AEA, with the commercial publishers of journals, particularly Elsevier.
Reputedly the ones most annoying to these panjandrums were the Journal of
Public Economics and the Journal of Econometrics. Supposedly there were
originally going to be more specifically field journals targeting some of
the particular, more prominent Elsevier journals, with the possibility even
of some (or at least one) being somewhat less orthodox or mainstream than
what appears in the AER. In the end, they compromised and are coming out
with these four “semi-field” journals.
As I am arguably an interested party, I probably should not comment further,
but I lack enthusiasm for them, although I actually thought there were a couple
of interesting papers in the macro one, which is edited by Olivier Blanchard.
However, they do seem very establishment-oriented. Esther Duflo has had some
great press recently, and is apparently a minor celebrity in France. But nearly
all the papers in the journal she edits came out of either Harvard or MIT.
Another factor in all this is that the AEA has been very successful with its
past journal innovations, the JEL, and more recently the Journal of Economic
Perspectives, which has been a big hit. The funny thing about the JEP is that
it was meant to be a downscale, not so serious journal, signaled by the fact
that each issue is paginated from page 1, making it more like a newsmagazine
than an academic journal (which are paginated by volume, not by issue). As it
is, the JEP is taken very seriously and papers in it are cited very frequently.
I think this has made the AEA bosses complacent and figuring they can put out
whatever, and people will just gobble it up. We shall see, but I am doubting
that these as a group will match the success of either the JEL or the JEP,
although perhaps one or two of them might do reasonably well.
Kind of makes you think maybe the whole point is “research” is merely to rack up publications …
“For many people, top field is their publication goal, and the creation of new journals in those niches is ultimately good for those of us who need more targets with hopefully shorter turnaround times.”
Barkley, can you please list the papers that cite the editor. I look over and only found the first paper of the issue cited the editor. Thanks.
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