Doing Economics

4.13 Publicizing after Publishing
Though the goal of every junior researcher is to get their papers accepted,
one should take the long view and consider what matters in the long run.
Yes, the quality of your articles and the journals they’re published in as well
as the quantity of publications you have all matter for the welfare of your
career. Once your position in the profession is relatively secure (say,

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because you have tenure or have been promoted), however, what matters for
the next step in your career more often than not has to do with your impact
as a scholar.
For better or for worse, impact is nowadays measured in terms of the
number of times your work is cited on the usual citation aggregators—
generally, Google Scholar or Web of Science. Citation counts are especially
useful when comparing scholarly impact between disciplines, or between
fields within a certain discipline. And for all of their imperfections—for
instance, they do not account for quality of the source citing the work, nor
do they account for whether the source citing the work is critical of it—they
remain the most democratic and objective measure of scholarly impact.
How do you ensure that your work receives the right amount of
attention? Obviously, scholarly impact is heavily dependent on decisions
made months if not years ahead of publication. Empirical articles that
provide a credible finding about a policy question that is on people’s minds
at the moment the article is published will tend to be more relevant than an
umpteenth proof of Arrow’s impossibility theorem, no matter how simple
the former, and no matter how elegant the latter.
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There are steps you can take, however, as late as right before an article
goes to production if you want to increase its scholarly impact. The easiest
of such ways is to go with a good title. Here, clear trumps clever, and the
shorter your title, the better in terms of citations, it seems. Though their
empirical methods would not be convincing to most economists, Letchford
et al. (2015) discuss descriptive evidence according to which papers with
shorter titles get cited more frequently.
Next, except for the really technical terms (e.g., dynamic stochastic
general equilibrium model, regression discontinuity design), your abstract
should be intelligible to a college-educated reader. Similarly, your
introduction should be mostly intelligible to a college-educated reader.
Having your title, abstract, and introduction (and perhaps your conclusion)
intelligible to people outside your field, outside your discipline, and ideally
outside of academia altogether can do wonders for your scholarly impact.
As I mentioned in chapter 2, people “read” papers inspectionally, which
means that if you want your work to have impact, the parts they read should
be accessible to them. You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it

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drink. Nothing prevents you, however, from bringing water up to its mouth
once you get to water!
One thing that often gets overlooked in terms of expected impact is
search engine optimization (better known as SEO), which is about how
search engine algorithms will look for keywords and organize searches as a
result. Though repetition makes for less elegant writing, it is better for your
title, highlights (if applicable), abstract, keywords, and introduction to
consistently use the same keywords to denote the same concepts. In other
words, a web page that has the word “apple” 100 times in it will rank higher
in search engine search results than a web page with the word “apple” only
10 times on it, ceteris paribus. For instance, I have done a lot of work on
the economic institution of contract farming. Many people refer to contract
farming arrangements as “outgrower schemes,” or “grower–processor
contracts.” In the interest of writing elegantly, it was tempting to write my
abstracts so that they would cycle through those various names for the
institution. But because of the way search engines rank-order various pages,
it was much better to consistently use “contract farming” in my titles,
abstracts, highlights, keywords, and my introductions, because doing so
moved my articles on the topic significantly up in searches for “contract
farming.” I obviously will never know the counterfactual, but I believe this
has translated into more citations to my work.
Once your article is accepted for publication, it is wise to post a pre-print
(i.e., the version of the paper you submitted and which was finally accepted
for publication) on your website, though not all publishers will allow that,
as some publishers embargo papers until they are published. When in doubt,
consult the journal or the publisher’s policy on pre-prints.
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One obvious way to make your work easily accessible is pay for open
access, either through choosing to publish in journals that are entirely open
access (e.g., PLoS ONE) or by choosing open access for your work that gets
published with traditionally paid-access publishers (e.g., Elsevier, MIT
Press, Wiley). Either way, you will need to have substantial research funds
at your disposal in order to be able to publish open access. That said,
funding agencies (e.g., the European Research Council) and donors (e.g.,
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) increasingly require the research they
fund to be published open access; the good news is that this means that they
also tend to provide you with the necessary funds to do so. In a recent

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working paper, Staudt (2020) exploits the National Institutes of Health’s
Public Access Policy (PAP) as an instrumental variable for whether an
article is public access. His estimate of the local average treatment effect—
in this case, the effect of open access on citations for those articles that
were made open access as a result of the PAP—is positive, and shows an
increase in citations of up to 50 percent. Taking Staudt’s results at face
value, the relevant trade-off is between your article’s (expected) increase in
citations against a publisher’s price for open access.
Another way to publicize your work and get it in front of the eyes of the
people who are likely to be most interested in it is through social media.
The beauty of social media is that on social media, people’s networks tend
to be rich in researchers who are working both within their fields and
disciplines but also in researchers who are working on related topics across
disciplines, and so it is well worth cultivating a professional social media
presence if you want to increase your work’s scholarly impact. I will have
more to say about using social media in chapter 6.
One way to publicize your work which I would caution against is through
a mass-email list, both because there is too much email already and because
the impersonal nature of these emails tends to turn people off. That being
said, thoughtful individualized emails (e.g., “Given your earlier work on the
topic, I thought you might be interested in this new paper of mine”)
certainly work well.
If you care about real-world impact, one place to start is with your
university’s media relations office. Much of the work done by economists
nowadays can be argued to have ties to what goes on in the real world, and
your institution’s media relations folks will be able to write up a press
release about your work and circulate it to the media if you take the time to
clearly explain to them what your work is about, what it says and what it
does not say, and why it is important. At wealthier universities, the media
relations office can even assist you in writing an op-ed about your work and
shopping it around to various media outlets. If you care about having policy
or business impact, this is probably the most fruitful way to have such an
impact.