Before we begin new posts next week, here are the 10 Development Impact posts published in 2018 that were most popular (by number of page views).
10.
The latest research in economics on Africa: The CSAE round-up
9. What’s new in education research? Impact evaluations and measurement – January 2018 round-up
8. What do we learn from increasing teacher salaries in Indonesia? More than the students did.
7. The State of Development Journals 2018: Quality, Acceptance Rates, Review Times, and Representation
6. What’s the latest in development economics research? Microsummaries of 150+ papers from NEUDC 2018
5. GiveDirectly Three-Year Impacts, Explained
9. What’s new in education research? Impact evaluations and measurement – January 2018 round-up
8. What do we learn from increasing teacher salaries in Indonesia? More than the students did.
7. The State of Development Journals 2018: Quality, Acceptance Rates, Review Times, and Representation
6. What’s the latest in development economics research? Microsummaries of 150+ papers from NEUDC 2018
5. GiveDirectly Three-Year Impacts, Explained
4. Rethinking identification under the Bartik Shift-Share Instrument
3. How to Publish Statistically Insignificant Results in Economics
2. Dear governments: Want to help the poor and transform your economy? Hold on, recalculating…
1. How can machine learning and artificial intelligence be used in development interventions and impact evaluations?
The problem with simply counting page views for a top ten list is that it naturally favors posts from early in the year, since they’ve had more time to accumulate views. That’s consistent with the data: Only one of the above posts was published after April (#6).
An alternative would be to calculate an adjusted score, such as the average page views per day since the post was published. But if posts accumulate most of their views in the first few days or weeks, then recent posts will be favored since their average will be high as they are still in their “popular” phase. (That’s also consistent with the data: Ordered that way, only three of the top ten posts were published before September.)
Of course, you could use the average decay in page views over time to construct a… Okay, too complicated. Here are the six additional posts that would have made it into the top ten if we were doing a simple per-day popularity ranking:
- Make Your Research Known – 10 Tools to Increase Consumption of Your Research
- Here comes the sun(set): it puts children to sleep and affects global educational outcomes: Guest post by Maulik Jagnani
- 8 lessons on how to influence policy with evidence – from Oxfam’s experience
- A Curated List of Our Postings on Technical Topics – Your One-Stop Shop for Methodology
- Why are relatively poor people not more supportive of redistribution? Guest Post by Christopher Hoy
- Some of our favorite development papers of 2018
Happy reading, and we’re looking forward to a new year of evaluating impact!
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