Links for 4/7/10

This will likely be the last links blog for a couple weeks. Just don't write anything important while I'm gone :)

Peter Conn

I would much prefer to define our current job-market difficulties as a problem in underdemand rather than oversupply. The facts, however, cannot be denied. After a generation of dithering, we need to act decisively to minimize the damage that our practices are inflicting on thousands of talented young women and men whose aspirations and idealism are jeopardized by our institutional inertia as well as by our laissez-faire, wishful thinking that the job market will simply take care of itself.

Stuart Macdonald

[referees] are seen as part of the editorial team, gatekeepers blackballing what does not fit, screening for what is wrong with a paper rather than what is right.

When upsetting a single referee means certain rejection, authors play safe and deliver what is most likely to please. At revision stage, many change what they know to be right to satisfy a referee.

As surely as a top journal identifies academic expertise, high impact factor – a calculation of how often a journal’s papers are cited – identifies a top journal. This, too, is manipulated. Editors aim to publish only the most citable papers…

Our latest research reveals citability leading to clubability… For instance, the Journal of Marketing Research, with 60% internal citation by its few, shows almost no interest in anything that is not published in the Journal of Marketing Research…

Academics no longer look to this distorted system to identify experts. But politicians still do…

Arnold Kling

I tend to think of majors in science, math, and engineering as having obtained skills, majors in education have obtained credentials, and majors in business, social science, and humanities as having obtained neither. That is a gross over-generalization, of course.