- Vision statement from Tage Rai, the new social and behavioral sciences editor for Science on what they are looking for: “I feel that our strength is the ability to bridge across social sciences in a way that very few outlets can and at a level that none can match. Therefore, we will be emphasizing papers that cross over major fields more strongly than ever before (e.g. psychology and anthropology, economics and political science, sociology and computer science).... The other major concern that I encounter has to do with scientific practice and reproducibility concerns within the social sciences. Science is actively engaged with these issues and continues to consider best practices going forward. ... First, only a small percentage of papers are sent out for in-depth review. For these papers only, authors will be asked to upload their data to an online repository accessible to reviewers.... I will host a twitter Q&A to answer any questions people may have about publishing with Science. For example, I am often asked about formatting for Science. As most papers are rejected, my approach is to be pretty loose about formatting, with the understanding that if a paper moves further into the process, we can revisit questions of word length and formatting at that time.”
- Following up on my posts (part 1, part 2) this week on doing development in liberal arts colleges, Shreyasee Das has a thread on the challenges faced doing development research at non-R1/non-LAC schools.
- Job market advice from Marc Bellemare, especially for those doing agricultural economics.
- VoxDev features a post by one of our new hires in the research group, Girija Borker, summarizing her work on street harassment and female college education in India.
- The latest CSWEP newsletter has advice on how to talk to the media about your research, and what to do when your research goes viral.
- On the Education for Development blog, costing education interventions, and how an initial budget can swell quickly when all factors are costed.
- Heckman and Moktan now have an NBER working paper out on the Tyranny of the Top 5 – they look at tenure decisions for all faculty hired in the top-35 schools over 1996-2010 “An individual with a single top five publication is predicted to have a 0.29 probability of receiving tenure. The predicted probability increases to 0.43 and 0.63 for individuals with two and three top five publications respectively.”...Top 5s matter even after controlling for quality as proxied by citations...junior faculty perceive books and book chapters as least useful for tenure...yet there is lots of overlap in citations, and the median ReStat article has more cites than the median ReStud article....the top 50 development economists according to RePec publish the largest share of their work in the Journal of Economic Growth, World Bank Research Observer, WBER, EDCC, and JDE....”papers published in non top-5 journals account for 70% of the most cited articles in the past 10 and 20 years”. [addendum: a summary blog post by the authors]
- Finally, are you stuck writing your abstract? Then here to help you is the abstract mad-lib from PhD comics.
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