Doing Economics

4.14 Author Ethics

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There are numerous resources available at any PhD-granting institution for
you to learn about academic integrity in general. If you have not
familiarized yourself with them yet, take a moment to do so—depending on
what the social norms were during your pre-PhD training, some of the
current social norms surrounding academic integrity may be surprising to
you. About a decade ago, for instance, a well-known economist published
four articles on roughly the same topic in four different journals and, in at
least one case, without citing the other three articles. At the time,
accusations of self-plagiarism spread like wildfire (Shea 2011), and some of
the hitherto highly respected economists involved became pariahs whose
names will forever have an asterisk next to them.
Self-plagiarism can take subtler forms. For example, it is often the case
that people write two or more papers with the same data set. Every one of
those papers, however, has to present and discuss the data, and so it can be
tempting to cut and paste from an earlier paper that uses the same data.
Though this kind of self-plagiarism falls into more of a gray area than the
four-papers-on-the-same-topic case discussed above, do not let the “self”
part of “self-plagiarism” do all the lifting—self-plagiarism is still
plagiarism. It is not fun to have to tell the same story two or more times
differently each time, but it is a small price to pay in comparison to having
to collect brand new data or to having your reputation put into question
because you reused some of your own writing.
Notes
1
. Even after doing this job for almost 15 years, I have never experienced such a lucky event, and
after handling roughly 1500 articles at two journals, my recollection is that I have only accepted
one article after the first round of review.
2
. See, for instance, Mazières and Kohler (2005). The authors having had enough of receiving
solicitations from the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, they submitted a
paper titled “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List” to it. The paper, which consists of nothing
but the title phrase repeated over and over for 10 pages, was accepted and subsequently published
by that journal. See Stromberg (2014) for the broader story behind Mazières and Kohler’s paper,
as well as for other examples.
3
. Do not confuse journals that have author processing charges (APCs) with predatory journals. On
the one hand, some legitimate journals, like PNAS, will charge authors for the costs of processing
and producing an article if and only if that article makes it through their review process. On the
other hand, predatory journals will publish just about any article for a fee. You can usually tell
whether a journal is legitimate or predatory by looking at whether it is indexed on RepEc or

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EconLit or other bibliographic databases, whether it has an impact factor (or other measures of
impact), or whether the authors who publish in it are people whose names you recognize from
having read their work in legitimate journals. You can also ask your advisors or your more
experienced colleagues what they think of a given journal. When in doubt, it is best to err on the
side of caution, and assume that a journal is predatory.
4
. If you are not sure, though a simple search-engine search will typically yield the results you want,
you should also consult with your advisors or more experienced colleagues. There are also a few
online resources dedicated to helping researchers avoid falling prey to predatory journals; as of
this writing, Beall’s List of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers (
http://beallslist.net
) is the
best-known such resource.
5
. I will return to this classification in chapter 5, but for our purposes, this follows the Carnegie
Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. According to that classification, there are R1
universities (doctoral universities with very high research activity), R2 universities (doctoral
universities with high research activity), D/PU universities (doctoral/professional universities),
and so on. See 
https://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/
for a complete classification.
6
. Unless otherwise noted, I refer to a journal’s simple impact factor when I write “impact factor.” A
journal’s simple impact factor is the number of citations to articles in that journal in the
Clarivate/Web of Science Journal Citation Reports during a given year divided by the number of
articles published by that journal over the previous two years. As with any performance measure,
a simple impact factor is not perfect. It is nonetheless a proxy for a scholar’s impact that is widely
used across all scientific disciplines, and thus favored by college- and university-level tenure and
promotion committees.
7
. Another strategy in such cases, if it is available to you, is to look at the research portfolio
someone who has gotten tenure in your school or department in the last two or three years.
8
. See Kleemans and Thornton (2021) for evidence on the determinants of NBER membership.
9
. “Double-blind” here refers to those cases where the reviewers are anonymous to the authors, and
the authors are in principle anonymous to the reviewers—“in principle” because the working-
paper culture of economics, combined with search engines, means that it is generally easy to
figure out who wrote what. “Single-blind” refers to those cases where the reviewers are
anonymous to the authors, but the reviewers know who the authors are. On the basis of
experimental evidence, Tomkins et al. (2017) show that single-blind reviewing disadvantages
authors who are not famous or who do not work at prestigious institutions.
10
. Here, it might be tempting to thank your significant other or family members, as they have
almost surely supported morally or financially while you were working on your paper. It is
customary, however, not to do so. Similarly, you may have discussed your paper for a few minutes
with a famous economist when she visited your department, or with a Nobel laureate at a
conference. Unless those people have made game-changing comments—the kind of comment that
profoundly changes your work—refrain from wanting to be seen as associating with the good and
the great by thanking them. The fact that you once discussed your paper with Paul Krugman will
not make your paper more likely to be sent out for review or accepted for publication. If anything,
it may even set unreasonably high expectations about it.
11
. As of writing, only Elsevier journals require highlights, and they require that each bullet be 85
characters or less, including spaces.
12
. For instance, in economics, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the Journal of