In the middle of
the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, I noticed that there were numbers being released on the number of orphans the outbreak was creating, but no transparent methodology for where those numbers were coming from. My colleague
Anna Popova and I constructed numbers based on age- and gender-specific mortality and fertility rates, and we submitted the paper to the Lancet. It was a short but – we thought – useful paper. The Lancet published it as a “letter,” which means a short paper of 400 words, up to 5 references, and 1 table or figure. (
Here it is!) Later, we teamed up with
Markus Goldstein to examine the likely impact of the epidemic of maternal mortality (via health worker mortality) and published that as a letter of similar proportions in the Lancet Global Health. (
Here’s that one!)
Good ideas don’t have to be long ideas. (I have a lot of short ideas.) But researchers can feel adrift as to where to send short papers. Here are some ideas, culled from my experience and that of the Twitter hive mind.
What is a short paper, and where can I publish it?
I identified 10 journals that publish short papers. I’ve listed them below, with links to the journals, what they call their short papers, and a link to a recent example.
Okay, but where is the best place to publish short papers?
Here are the same ten journals, ranked by the number of cites per document over two recent years, from Scimago (since it calculates for all journals). For journals for which it’s available (economics-related journals), I include the RePec rank, which is an aggregation of multiple impact measures.
Of course, for journals that don’t exclusively publish short papers, these numbers may not be very representative (if, for example, short papers are cited less frequently). Indeed, the three journals on the list that specialize in short papers – Economics Letters, Applied Economics Letters, and Economics Bulletin – have the lowest 2-year citation count per paper, although Economics Letters and Economics Bulletin do better on the aggregate mean (RePec rank). This shouldn’t be depressing: Hopefully short papers take less of your time to write, so a lower return (in terms of citations) may be okay.
Let’s complement that with a few examples. The Lancet letter on Ebola orphans, published in 2015, has 10 citations. The Lancet Global Health letter on Ebola-related maternal mortality has 23 citations, also published in 2015. De Mel et al.’s 2012 report on cash transfers in Science has 62 citations. Well, you might argue, these are all on topics of high interest in the highest ranked journals on the list. That’s true. (Also, at least with the first two, we wrote blog posts to promote them.)
If you publish in Economics Letters or Applied Economics Letters, are you destined to 0.34-0.58 citations? (What would a third or a half of a citation look like? Replace “Evans and Popova 2016” with “Evans a” or “Evans and P”; not very satisfying for my co-author.)
I checked a few 2012 issues of Economics Letters, 5 years old so there has been time for citations to level out (so, longer than the 2-year horizon above). Here is what I found for empirical development papers – which are not so common in Economics Letters. There are some, but there are a small minority of total papers in the journal.
Schady and Rosero had a paper on cash transfers there in 2008 that has 122 citations. Hanushek and Woessman had an education paper there in 2011 that has 38 citations. These non-representative examples are intended to demonstrate only that there is a right tail, so if you have a paper that is of interest to the broader research community, it can still get cited if it’s in Economics Letters.
Isn’t this a lot of trouble? Why not just publish on a blog?
If you can get your work featured on a popular blog, then overall exposure might be higher than merely publishing in a journal, with less work. But I see several reasons to continue to try and publish short papers in journals.
If you believe there is value in expanding the audience, in the quality improvement, and if the citations are useful for you professionally, then it may be worthwhile. My two published letters came out quite quickly and were improved by the publication process. I have another letter that’s been sitting at a journal for 9 months, which seems like a lot for 5 pages.
Of course, if you have a really short idea, you can always go for the Journal of Brief Ideas. Or just tweet about it.
Good ideas don’t have to be long ideas. (I have a lot of short ideas.) But researchers can feel adrift as to where to send short papers. Here are some ideas, culled from my experience and that of the Twitter hive mind.
What is a short paper, and where can I publish it?
I identified 10 journals that publish short papers. I’ve listed them below, with links to the journals, what they call their short papers, and a link to a recent example.
Okay, but where is the best place to publish short papers?
Here are the same ten journals, ranked by the number of cites per document over two recent years, from Scimago (since it calculates for all journals). For journals for which it’s available (economics-related journals), I include the RePec rank, which is an aggregation of multiple impact measures.
| Journal | Cites / doc (2 years) | RePec rank |
| Lancet | 26.55 | -- |
| Science | 18.05 | -- |
| Lancet Global Health | 14.26 | -- |
| PLOS One | 3.03 | -- |
| Health Economics | 1.67 | 62 |
| Economics of Education Review | 1.37 | 126 |
| Journal of International Development | 0.91 | 287 |
| Economics Letters | 0.58 | 37 |
| Applied Economics Letters | 0.34 | 178 |
| Economics Bulletin | 0.20 | 56 |
Of course, for journals that don’t exclusively publish short papers, these numbers may not be very representative (if, for example, short papers are cited less frequently). Indeed, the three journals on the list that specialize in short papers – Economics Letters, Applied Economics Letters, and Economics Bulletin – have the lowest 2-year citation count per paper, although Economics Letters and Economics Bulletin do better on the aggregate mean (RePec rank). This shouldn’t be depressing: Hopefully short papers take less of your time to write, so a lower return (in terms of citations) may be okay.
Let’s complement that with a few examples. The Lancet letter on Ebola orphans, published in 2015, has 10 citations. The Lancet Global Health letter on Ebola-related maternal mortality has 23 citations, also published in 2015. De Mel et al.’s 2012 report on cash transfers in Science has 62 citations. Well, you might argue, these are all on topics of high interest in the highest ranked journals on the list. That’s true. (Also, at least with the first two, we wrote blog posts to promote them.)
If you publish in Economics Letters or Applied Economics Letters, are you destined to 0.34-0.58 citations? (What would a third or a half of a citation look like? Replace “Evans and Popova 2016” with “Evans a” or “Evans and P”; not very satisfying for my co-author.)
I checked a few 2012 issues of Economics Letters, 5 years old so there has been time for citations to level out (so, longer than the 2-year horizon above). Here is what I found for empirical development papers – which are not so common in Economics Letters. There are some, but there are a small minority of total papers in the journal.
| Paper | Total Citations |
| Intelligence and Corruption, by Potrafke | 75 |
| Fertility choice under child mortality and social norms, by Battacharya & Chakraborty | 14 |
| Child gender and parental borrowing: Evidence from India, by Agier et al. | 11 |
| A back-door brain drain, by Stark & Byra | 9 |
| Accounting for the effect of health on cross-state income inequality in India, by Sperling & Kjoller-Hansen | 1 |
| Land reforms and social unrest: An empirical investigation of riots in India, by Roy | 0 |
Schady and Rosero had a paper on cash transfers there in 2008 that has 122 citations. Hanushek and Woessman had an education paper there in 2011 that has 38 citations. These non-representative examples are intended to demonstrate only that there is a right tail, so if you have a paper that is of interest to the broader research community, it can still get cited if it’s in Economics Letters.
Isn’t this a lot of trouble? Why not just publish on a blog?
If you can get your work featured on a popular blog, then overall exposure might be higher than merely publishing in a journal, with less work. But I see several reasons to continue to try and publish short papers in journals.
- Different audiences: The journal and the blog post may well reach different audiences. Development Impact will likely reach a very different group of people (with some overlap) than the Lancet. Depending on the people you want to reach with your research, the journal may be a better fit.
- Adding audiences: If you publish the paper in a journal, you can still write a blog post about it. You’re much less likely to publish a paper about your blog post. Impossible in the 21st century? Surely not. But less likely.
- Quality improvement: With our Lancet letter, we first submitted the paper elsewhere, where it was rejected but with very useful comments. The letter published by the Lancet was much better as a result of the peer review process.
If you believe there is value in expanding the audience, in the quality improvement, and if the citations are useful for you professionally, then it may be worthwhile. My two published letters came out quite quickly and were improved by the publication process. I have another letter that’s been sitting at a journal for 9 months, which seems like a lot for 5 pages.
Of course, if you have a really short idea, you can always go for the Journal of Brief Ideas. Or just tweet about it.
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