Weekly Links, April 7: Unpaywall, good and fake news from Malawi, doing research in conflict zones, and more...

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  • Just this week, I provided a journalist with a bunch of citations, most of which she could not access. Perhaps, no more? LSE Impact Blog discusses the Unpaywall: "The extension is called Unpaywall, and it’s powered by an open index of more than ten million legally-uploaded, open access resources. Reports from our pre-release are great: “Unpaywall found a full-text copy 53% of the time,” reports librarian, Lydia Thorne. Fisheries researcher Lachlan Fetterplace used Unpaywall to find “about 60% of the articles I tested. This one is a great tool and I suspect it will only get better.” And indeed it has! We’re now getting full-text on 85% of 2016’s most-covered research papers."  
  • Good news and fake news from Malawi: large fertility declines in Malawi (real), declines in HIV prevalence (unfortunately, not real). Read about it in Jason Kerwin's blog.
  • How to do research in conflict zones (Monkey Cage Blog).
  • Heterogeneous treatment effects in psychiatry: will fMRIs help with better diagnosis and treatment of depression? (Vox)
  • Over at Urbanomics, Gulzar Natarajan takes issue with an old (2.5 years old) post of my colleague Jishnu Das (and Jeff Hammer), titled "Are Institutional Births Institutionalizing Deaths?" and argues that "...institutional deliveries are a step in the right direction."
  • Should you correct for the degree of selectivity in that literature when conducting a meta-analysis? Kasy and Andrews discuss publication bias and propose methods to identify and correct for it. (paywalled, but try the Unpaywall extension above ;-)

Authors

Berk Özler

Lead Economist, Development Research Group, World Bank