TY - JOUR
T1 - Are leading papers of better quality? Evidence from a natural experiment
AU - Coupé, Tom
AU - Ginsburgh, Victor
AU - Noury, Abdul
N1 - Funding Information:
.......................................................................................................................................................................... 2Candidates to funding provided by the European Research Council in the 2008 round were asked to provide this information. 3See also Oswald (2008) for a related paper that provides a way of testing whether journals discriminate across nationalities (essentially European v. American authors), and whether there is a pro-Harvard bias in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
PY - 2009/6/19
Y1 - 2009/6/19
N2 - European countries in which universities rely on public funding increasingly follow the lead of the United Kingdom and run Research Assessment Exercises. Given the subjective nature of such evaluations, some scientists prefer verifiable measures such as citation counts. This, however, also is prone to problems since the number of cites is correlated, among others, with the order of appearance in an issue. In particular, leading papers are more cited. It is, thus, difficult to assess whether they are of better quality, or whether this happens 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 at the editors' discretion in other issues. Our estimates suggest that approximately two thirds of the additional cites are due to going first, and one third to higher quality.
AB - European countries in which universities rely on public funding increasingly follow the lead of the United Kingdom and run Research Assessment Exercises. Given the subjective nature of such evaluations, some scientists prefer verifiable measures such as citation counts. This, however, also is prone to problems since the number of cites is correlated, among others, with the order of appearance in an issue. In particular, leading papers are more cited. It is, thus, difficult to assess whether they are of better quality, or whether this happens 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 at the editors' discretion in other issues. Our estimates suggest that approximately two thirds of the additional cites are due to going first, and one third to higher quality.
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U2 - 10.1093/oep/gpp019
DO - 10.1093/oep/gpp019
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:77952722367
SN - 0030-7653
VL - 62
SP - 1
EP - 11
JO - Oxford Economic Papers
JF - Oxford Economic Papers
IS - 1
M1 - gpp019
ER -