Social Ties in Academia: A Friend is a Treasure

Abstract

Social Ties in Academia: A Friend is a Treasure *This paper employs a unique dataset on articles, authors and editors of the top general interest journals in economics to investigate the role of social connections in the publication process. Ties between editors and authors are identified based on their academic histories. Results show that an editor's former PhD students and faculty colleagues experience an increase in their publication outcomes when this editor is in charge of a journal. The analysis of articles' citations suggests that connections ultimately improve the quality of published papers.

The authors of economics journals revisited: evidence from a large-scale replication of Hodgson and Rothman (1999)

“…In this vein, Figure 6 can be fruitfully interpreted in greater detail. For instance, we observe in line with other studies (Colussi, 2018;Medoff, 2006) that institutional ties also do play a role for the allocation of journal space within top journals as the JPEwhich is edited at the University of Chicago and published by the in-house pressshows a disproportionately high share of papers coming from the University of Chicago, while the QJE is traditionally associated with Harvard and MIT, which also reflects on the share of contributors in the QJE, that are associated with said universities. The obvious importance of such institutional ties is thereby difficult to align with the usual reasoning in economics that the dominant position of some institutions simply reflects the high quality of their associated research outputs as such a 'home-bias' is difficult to rationalize in terms of pure differences in research quality.…”

“…Thereby we show authorship shares for the top 5 journals and the top 30 journals separately, to assess whether institutional concentration increases with rank in the hierarchy of journals. This intuition is supported by the already discussed observation that highly visible institutions, authors and journals form a close-knit network (Colussi, 2018;Heckman and Moktan, 2020)hence, we would expect 'top-journals', 'top-authors' and 'top-institutions' to cluster together. By comparing the authorship shares of the top institutions within the top 5 and the top 30 journals we find that the data provides some support for this intuition.…”

“…That these simultaneously reinforcing relationships shape institutional hierarchies becomes especially clear when thinking about the close interconnections between specific economics departments with great visibility and prestige (most prominently: Harvard, Chicago and the MIT; see also Medoff (2006)), the discipline's major outlets (like QJE, AER or Econometrica) and the important role US-based PhD programs play for the education of economic research professionals. Thus, by analyzing these relations in greater depth we indeed find that important authors, contributions, departments, and outlets are strongly concentrated in terms of their spatial distribution (Gibson, 2021), their personal as well as professional networks (Colussi, 2018) as well as their biography (e.g. shared PhD-granting institutions).…”

Global Diversity of Authors, Editors, and Journal Ownership Across Subdisciplines of Psychology: Current State and Policy Implications

“…Such home country biases at the editor level have important consequences for authorship because editors are more likely to accept manuscripts by authors from the same institutions (by definition, the same country). For example, in economic journals, during the tenure of an editor, graduate students and faculty colleagues of the editor increased the number of articles in that journal by about 14% and 8%, respectively (Colussi, 2018).…”

Peer Effects in Academic Research: Senders and Receivers

“…Column (3) shows that there is an effect of the average productivity of peers on the number of 18 There is also evidence that peers can help in their position as editors (see Colussi, 2018).…”