Tale je zelo zabavna anekdota. Ko ne-ekonomisti resno vzamejo preference ekonomistov glede outleta za objave in njihove preference testirajo na “medicinski način”. Pravkar objavljena raziskava Attema, Brouwer & Van Exel (2013) se sprašuje: Bi za objavo v American Economic Review (AER) res dali desno roko, morda ledvico, ali pa zgolj prst? Bi žrtvovali več za revijo z višjim faktorjem vpliva (impact factor)?
In rezultati? Heh, ekonomisti bi za objavo v AER žrtvovali veliko, vendar ne cele roke. Morda desni palec. Faktor vpliva ne igra pomembne vloge, pač pa prestižnost revije.
‘I would give my right arm for a publication in the American Economic Review’, a colleague economist once sighed. This remark was the starting point of the here presented study, as it contains a number of interesting elements. First of all, the remark was a preference statement of the person involved. Seemingly (and unsurprisingly), he would value a paper in the American Economic Review (AER). Second, the strength of the preference was expressed in terms of sacrificing a non-negligible proportion of his health (in the form of sacrificing a limb, i.e., his right arm). This is interesting, since in the field of health economics, preferences for (health) states are often measured through tradeoffs involving sacrificing length or quality of life. Considering the utility value of an arm, the statement made by the fellow economist, taken literally, would imply quite a strong preference for an AER publication. Third, this preference was labeled to the AER rather than to journals which may have higher impact scores. Although impact scores may have become more important in recent years, economists therefore may rank order journals differently than impact scores would imply.
These considerations raised two questions that we found interesting to explore further: (i) Would economists really sacrifice a limb for a publication in a top journal, and can this preference be measured using a common method in health economics, the time tradeoff (TTO) method? (ii) What would be the ranking of top economic journals based on preferences elicited by trading off health against publications?
Notwithstanding the obvious difficulties to be expected in such an investigation, we designed a study for this purpose. In this paper we report the results.
To measure the preferences for a publication in a leading economic journal in relation to health, the TTO method was used. This is a popular method for eliciting preferences for health states. While it is a stated preference method (since revealed preferences for health states are difficult to obtain), the resulting preferences are used in economic evaluations informing actual decision making in health care. The TTO basically lets individuals make a tradeoff between quality and quantity of life. A typical TTO exercise involves a tradeoff between living in some imperfect chronic health state (such as living without a limb) for ten years and living in perfect health for a period of less than ten years. …
The TTO may just as well be applied for other preferences. Here we use it to value publishing in top economic journals and compare this to valuations of limbs. The TTO consisted of a tradeoff between living ten years without a(n additional) publication in the AER and a shorter period with such a publication, and tradeoffs between living ten years without a limb, or a shorter period in perfect health. This gives us an estimate of the fraction of their life that respondents would be willing to give up for a publication in AER, which can be compared to the fraction they would be willing to sacrifice for retaining a limb. This allows investigating the opening statement of this paper.
Moreover, by making these tradeoffs for four different economic journals, AER, European Economic Review (EER), Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE) and the Review of Economic Studies (RES), their preference based ranking could be observed and compared to their ranking on the basis of impact factors. In order to test the results obtained we also used the more commonly used willingness to pay (WTP) technique (…) to investigate stated preferences for a publication in these journals. (This also allowed expressing the value of a limb in monetary terms.)
This paper presents the results of this study, showing that economists indicate a stronger preference for publications in AER than in the other top economic journals, which suggests that impact factors may not fully reflect the preferences of scholars. Moreover, while we find that it is possible to use the TTO for eliciting such preferences (and that the resulting rank order equals that of the WTP estimates), sacrificing a right thumb appears to be a better approximation of the strength of preference for a publication in AER than a right arm.
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