To the Editor:
The “Publishing and Promotion in Economics: The Tyranny of the Top Five” is a study by Nobel laureate James Heckman and Sidharth Moktan, in which they criticize the influence of leading journals and power of their editors (“How Much Does Publishing in Top Journals Boost Tenure Prospects? In Economics, a Lot,” The Chronicle, October 1). Although top-five publications are the dominant currency for tenure and promotion, the authors doubt that these journals are places of excellence. Due to editors’ tastes and journals’ biases they instead raise entry costs for new ideas, emphasizing methodical elegance with low citation success of their follow-up work.
The increasing importance of the top five is also reflected in their increasing number of submissions. In 2017, the number of submissions to the American Political Science Review (APSR) increased by 40 percent to about 1,400 manuscripts. Consequently, the acceptance rate dropped to 5 percent, leading to more disappointed authors and growing criticism. This creates an interesting Catch-22 dilemma for editors because they need to motivate the 95 percent rejected authors to further provide their expertise to review other submissions.
However, the criticism receives more attention coming from prominent scholars who warn that “career-oriented authors appeal to the tastes of editors and biases of journals.” Heckman and Moktan justify this conclusion by quoting excellent work that has initially been rejected and point to fewer quotations of top-five articles than those in other journals. Similar criticism is expressed by a study of Teele and Thelen (2017), which attributes the lower proportion of female publications to editors’ preferences of subfields and methods.
Because university committees decide about tenure and promotion, it is astonishing that editors are identified as the source of erroneous trends. As an analysis of APSR submissions shows, the number of female submissions is lower than that of their male counterparts (König and Ropers 2018). This suggests that they have different incentives and constraints for submitting their research to top-five journals. As Sarsons (2017) reveals, women are less likely to receive tenure the more they coauthor (with men).
The reference to initial rejection and fewer citations is misleading. Citations reflect prominence rather than excellence, which is more likely to increase by publishing in specialized journals, which offer symposia and special issues. Top-five journals, which represent several sub-disciplines, have a more heterogeneous readership, which reduces the citation probability of their publications. Furthermore, initial rejections refute the dynamic character of the peer-review process. Among the published APSR articles there is not a single manuscript that remained unchanged over the review process.
Finally, it raises the question of why prominent scholars decide to criticize top-five journals. One explanation could be that prominence promotes and relies on established methods and insights. However, top-five publications need to consider the most recent developments and the state of the art. As opposed to to open-source publications, the top five send manuscripts out to several reviewers without information about the name and origin of authors, so that the reviewers only assess the submitted manuscript independent from prominence of authors.
Thomas Koenig
Editor, The American Political Science Review
Professor of Political Science, University of Mannheim
Mannheim, Germany
