IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/29153.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Congestion on the Information Superhighway: Does Economics Have a Working Papers Problem?

Author

Listed:
  • Lester R. Lusher
  • Winnie Yang
  • Scott E. Carrell

Abstract

Publishing takes a long time in economics. Consequently, many authors release “working” versions of their papers. Using data on the NBER working paper series, we show that the dissemination of economics research suffers from an overcrowding problem: An increase in the number of weekly released working papers on average reduces downloads, abstract views, and media attention for each paper. Subsequent publishing and citation outcomes are harmed as well. Furthermore, descriptive evidence on viewership and downloads suggests working papers significantly substitute for the dissemination function of publication. These results highlight inefficiencies in the dissemination of economic research even among the most exclusive working paper series and suggest large social losses due to the slow publication process.

Suggested Citation

  • Lester R. Lusher & Winnie Yang & Scott E. Carrell, 2021. "Congestion on the Information Superhighway: Does Economics Have a Working Papers Problem?," NBER Working Papers 29153, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29153
    Note: ED LS
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w29153.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jussi T. S. Heikkila, 2022. "Journal of Economic Literature codes classification system (JEL)," Papers 2207.06076, arXiv.org.
    2. Davies, Benjamin, 2022. "Gender sorting among economists: Evidence from the NBER," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 217(C).
    3. Xie, Yundong & Wu, Qiang & Wang, Yezhu & Hou, Li & Liu, Yuanyuan, 2024. "Does the handling time of scientific papers relate to their academic impact and social attention? Evidence from Nature, Science, and PNAS," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2).
    4. Davies, Benjamin, 2022. "Sex-based sorting among economists: Evidence from the NBER," SocArXiv zeb7a, Center for Open Science.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I2 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education
    • J01 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General - - - Labor Economics: General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29153. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.