rejection

How to fix economics publishing

pnrj core principles, personal, science and academia , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 7 JDN 2459806

The current system of academic publishing in economics is absolutely horrible. It seems practically designed to undermine the mental health of junior faculty.

1. Tenure decisions, and even most hiring decisions, are almost entirely based upon publication in five (5) specific journals.

2. One of those “top five” journals is owned by Elsevier, a corrupt monopoly that has no basis for its legitimacy yet somehow controls nearly one-fifth of all scientific publishing.

3. Acceptance rates in all of these journals are between 5% and 10%—greatly decreased from what they were a generation or two ago. Given a typical career span, the senior faculty evaluating you on whether you were published in these journals had about a three times better chance to get their own papers published there than you do.

4. Submissions are only single-blinded, so while you have no idea who is reading your papers, they know exactly who you are and can base their decision on whether you are well-known in the profession—or simply whether they like you.

5. Simultaneous submissions are forbidden, so when submitting to journals you must go one at a time, waiting to hear back from one before trying the next.

6. Peer reviewers are typically unpaid and generally uninterested, and so procrastinate as long as possible on doing their reviews.

7. As a result, review times for a paper are often measured in months, for every single cycle.

So, a highly successful paper goes like this: You submit it to a top journal, wait three months, it gets rejected. You submit it to another one, wait another four months, it gets rejected. You submit it to a third one, wait another two months, and you are told to revise and resubmit. You revise and resubmit, wait another three months, and then finally get accepted.

You have now spent an entire year getting one paper published. And this was a success.

Now consider a paper that doesn’t make it into a top journal. You submit, wait three months, rejected; you submit again, wait four months, rejected; you submit again, wait two months, rejected. You submit again, wait another five months, rejected; you submit to the fifth and final top-five, wait another four months, and get rejected again.

Now, after a year and a half, you can turn to other journals. You submit to a sixth journal, wait three months, rejected. You submit to a seventh journal, wait four months, get told to revise and resubmit. You revise and resubmit, wait another two months, and finally—finally, after two years—actually get accepted, but not to a top-five journal. So it may not even help you get tenure, unless maybe a lot of people cite it or something.

And what if you submit to a seventh, an eighth, a ninth journal, and still keep getting rejected? At what point do you simply give up on that paper and try to move on with your life?

That’s a trick question: Because what really happens, at least to me, is I can’t move on with my life. I get so disheartened from all the rejections of that paper that I can’t bear to look at it anymore, much less go through the work of submitting it to yet another journal that will no doubt reject it again. But worse than that, I become so depressed about my academic work in general that I become unable to move on to any other research either. And maybe it’s me, but it isn’t just me: 28% of academic faculty suffer from severe depression, and 38% from severe anxiety. And that’s across all faculty—if you look just at junior faculty it’s even worse: 43% of junior academic faculty suffer from severe depression. When a problem is that prevalent, at some point we have to look at the system that’s making us this way.

I can blame the challenges of moving across the Atlantic during a pandemic, and the fact that my chronic migraines have been the most frequent and severe they have been in years, but the fact remains: I have accomplished basically nothing towards the goal of producing publishable research in the past year. I have two years left at this job; if I started right now, I might be able to get something published before my contract is done. Assuming that the project went smoothly, I could start submitting it as soon as it was done, and it didn’t get rejected as many times as the last one.

I just can’t find the motivation to do it. When the pain is so immediate and so intense, and the rewards are so distant and so uncertain, I just can’t bring myself to do the work. I had hoped that talking about this with my colleagues would help me cope, but it hasn’t; in fact it only makes me seem to feel worse, because so few of them seem to understand how I feel. Maybe I’m talking to the wrong people; maybe the ones who understand are themselves suffering too much to reach out to help me. I don’t know.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Here are some simple changes that could make the entire process of academic publishing in economics go better:

1. Boycott Elsevier and all for-profit scientific journal publishers. Stop reading their journals. Stop submitting to their journals. Stop basing tenure decisions on their journals. Act as though they don’t exist, because they shouldn’t—and then hopefully soon they won’t.

2. Peer reviewers should be paid for their time, and in return required to respond promptly—no more than a few weeks. A lack of response should be considered a positive vote on that paper.

3. Allow simultaneous submissions; if multiple journals accept, let the author choose between them. This is already how it works in fiction publishing, which you’ll note has not collapsed.

4. Increase acceptance rates. You are not actually limited by paper constraints anymore; everything is digital now. Most of the work—even in the publishing process—already has to be done just to go through peer review, so you may as well publish it. Moreover, most papers that are submitted are actually worthy of publishing, and this whole process is really just an idiotic status hierarchy. If the prestige of your journal decreases because you accept more papers, we are measuring prestige wrong. Papers should be accepted something like 50% of the time, not 5-10%.

5. Double blind submissions, and insist on ethical standards that maintain that blinding. No reviewer should know whether they are reading the work of a grad student or a Nobel Laureate. Reputation should mean nothing; scientific rigor should mean everything.

And, most radical of all, what I really need in my life right now:

6. Faculty should not have to submit their own papers. Each university department should have administrative staff whose job it is to receive papers from their faculty, format them appropriately, and submit them to journals. They should deal with all rejections, and only report to the faculty member when they have received an acceptance or a request to revise and resubmit. Faculty should simply do the research, write the papers, and then fire and forget them. We have highly specialized skills, and our valuable time is being wasted on the clerical tasks of formatting and submitting papers, which many other people could do as well or better. Worse, we are uniquely vulnerable to the emotional impact of the rejection—seeing someone else’s paper rejected is an entirely different feeling from having your own rejected.

Do all that, and I think I could be happy to work in academia. As it is, I am seriously considering leaving and never coming back.

I finally have a published paper.

pnrj personal, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 12 JDN 2459773

Here it is, my first peer-reviewed publication: “Imperfect Tactic Collusion and Asymmetric Price Transmission”, in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

Due to the convention in economics that authors are displayed alphabetically, I am listed third of four, and will be typically collapsed into “Bulutay et. al.”. I don’t actually think it should be “Julius et. al.”; I think Dave Hales did the most important work, and I wanted it to be “Hales et. al.”; but anything non-alphabetical is unusual in economics, and it would have taken a strong justification to convince the others to go along with it. This is a very stupid norm (and I attribute approximately 20% of Daron Acemoglu’s superstar status to it), but like any norm, it is difficult to dislodge.

I thought I would feel different when this day finally came. I thought I would feel joy, or at least satisfaction. I had been hoping that satisfaction would finally spur me forward in resubmitting my single-author paper, “Experimental Public Goods Games with Progressive Taxation”, so I could finally get a publication that actually does have “Julius (2022)” (or, at this rate, 2023, 2024…?). But that motivating satisfaction never came.

I did feel some vague sense of relief: Thank goodness, this ordeal is finally over and I can move on. But that doesn’t have the same motivating force; it doesn’t make me want to go back to the other papers I can now hardly bear to look at.

This reaction (or lack thereof?) could be attributed to circumstances: I have been through a lot lately. I was already overwhelmed by finishing my dissertation and going on the job market, and then there was the pandemic, and I had to postpone my wedding, and then when I finally got a job we had to suddenly move abroad, and then it was awful finding a place to live, and then we actually got married (which was lovely, but still stressful), and it took months to get my medications sorted with the NHS, and then I had a sudden resurgence of migraines which kept me from doing most of my work for weeks, and then I actually caught COVID and had to deal with that for a few weeks too. So it really isn’t too surprising that I’d be exhausted and depressed after all that.

Then again, it could be something deeper. I didn’t feel this way about my wedding. That genuinely gave me the joy and satisfaction that I had been expecting; I think it really was the best day of my life so far. So it isn’t as if I’m incapable of these feelings under my current state.

Rather, I fear that I am becoming more permanently disillusioned with academia. Now that I see how the sausage is made, I am no longer so sure I want to be one of the people making it. Publishing that paper didn’t feel like I had accomplished something, or even made some significant contribution to human knowledge. In fact, the actual work of publication was mostly done by my co-authors, because I was too overwhelmed by the job market at the time. But what I did have to do—and what I’ve tried to do with my own paper—felt like a miserable, exhausting ordeal.

More and more, I’m becoming convinced that a single experiment tells us very little, and we are being asked to present each one as if it were a major achievement when it’s more like a single brick in a wall.

But whatever new knowledge our experiments may have gleaned, that part was done years ago. We could have simply posted the draft as a working paper on the web and moved on, and the world would know just as much and our lives would have been a lot easier.

Oh, but then it would not have the imprimatur of peer review! And for our careers, that means absolutely everything. (Literally, when they’re deciding tenure, nothing else seems to matter.) But for human knowledge, does it really mean much? The more referee reports I’ve read, the more arbitrary they feel to me. This isn’t an objective assessment of scientific merit; it’s the half-baked opinion of a single randomly chosen researcher who may know next to nothing about the topic—or worse, have a vested interest in defending a contrary paradigm.

Yes, of course, what gets through peer review is of considerably higher quality than any randomly-selected content on the Internet. (The latter can be horrifically bad.) But is this not also true of what gets submitted for peer review? In fact, aren’t many blogs written by esteemed economists (say, Krugman? Romer? Nate Silver?) of considerably higher quality as well, despite having virtually none of the gatekeepers? I think Krugman’s blog is nominally edited by the New York Times, and Silver has a whole staff at FiveThirtyEight (they’re hiring, in fact!), but I’m fairly certain Romer just posts whatever he wants like I do. Of course, they had to establish their reputations (Krugman and Romer each won a Nobel). But still, it seems like maybe peer-review isn’t doing the most important work here.

Even blogs by far less famous economists (e.g. Miles Kimball, Brad DeLong) are also very good, and probably contribute more to advancing the knowledge of the average person than any given peer-reviewed paper, simply because they are more readable and more widely read. What we call “research” means going from zero people knowing a thing to maybe a dozen people knowing it; “publishing” means going from a dozen to at most a thousand; to go from a thousand to a billion, we call that “education”.

They all matter, of course; but I think we tend to overvalue research relative to education. A world where a few people know something is really not much better than a world where nobody does, while a world where almost everyone knows something can be radically superior. And the more I see just how far behind the cutting edge of research most economists are—let alone most average people—the more apparent it becomes to me that we are investing far too much in expanding that cutting edge (and far, far too much in gatekeeping who gets to do that!) and not nearly enough in disseminating that knowledge to humanity.

I think maybe that’s why finally publishing a paper felt so anticlimactic for me. I know that hardly anyone will ever actually read the damn thing. Just getting to this point took far more effort than it should have; dozens if not hundreds of hours of work, months of stress and frustration, all to satisfy whatever arbitrary criteria the particular reviewers happened to use so that we could all clear this stupid hurdle and finally get that line on our CVs. (And we wonder why academics are so depressed?) Far from being inspired to do the whole process again, I feel as if I have finally emerged from the torture chamber and may at last get some chance for my wounds to heal.

Even publishing fiction was not this miserable. Don’t get me wrong; it was miserable, especially for me, as I hate and fear rejection to the very core of my being in a way most people do not seem to understand. But there at least the subjectivity and arbitrariness of the process is almost universally acknowledged. Agents and editors don’t speak of your work being “flawed” or “wrong”; they don’t even say it’s “unimportant” or “uninteresting”. They say it’s “not a good fit” or “not what we’re looking for right now”. (Journal editors sometimes make noises like that too, but there’s always a subtext of “If this were better science, we’d have taken it.”) Unlike peer reviewers, they don’t come back with suggestions for “improvements” that are often pointless or utterly infeasible.

And unlike peer reviewers, fiction publishers acknowledge their own subjectivity and that of the market they serve. Nobody really thinks that Fifty Shades of Grey was good in any deep sense; but it was popular and successful, and that’s all the publisher really cares about. As a result, failing to be the next Fifty Shades of Grey ends up stinging a lot less than failing to be the next article in American Economic Review. Indeed, I’ve never had any illusions that my work would be popular among mainstream economists. But I once labored under the belief that it would be more important that it is true; and I guess I now consider that an illusion.

Moreover, fiction writers understand that rejection hurts; I’ve been shocked how few academics actually seem to. Nearly every writing conference I’ve ever been to has at least one seminar on dealing with rejection, often several; at academic conferences, I’ve literally never seen one. There seems to be a completely different mindset among academics—at least, the successful, tenured ones—about the process of peer review, what it means, even how it feels. When I try to talk with my mentors about the pain of getting rejected, they just… don’t get it. They offer me guidance on how to deal with anger at rejection, when that is not at all what I feel—what I feel is utter, hopeless, crushing despair.

There is a type of person who reacts to rejection with anger: Narcissists. (Look no further than the textbook example, Donald Trump.) I am coming to fear that I’m just not narcissistic enough to be a successful academic. I’m not even utterly lacking in narcissism: I am almost exactly average for a Millennial on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. I score fairly high on Authority and Superiority (I consider myself a good leader and a highly competent individual) but very low on Exploitativeness and Self-Sufficiency (I don’t like hurting people and I know no man is an island). Then again, maybe I’m just narcissistic in the wrong way: I score quite low on “grandiose narcissism”, but relatively high on “vulnerable narcissism”. I hate to promote myself, but I find rejection devastating. This combination seems to be exactly what doesn’t work in academia. But it seems to be par for the course among writers and poets. Perhaps I have the mind of a scientist, but I have the soul of a poet. (Send me through the wormhole! Please? Please!?)

How to be a good writer

pnrj personal , , , , , ,

Oct 25 JDN 2459148

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
~ Thomas Mann

“You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”

~ Red Smith

Why is it so difficult to write well? Why is it that those of us who write the most often find it the most agonizing?

My guess is that many other art forms are similar, but writing is what I know best.

I have come to realize that there are four major factors which determine the quality of someone’s writing, and the pain and challenge of writing comes from the fact that they are not very compatible with one another.

The first is talent. To a certain degree, one can be born a better or worse writer, or become so through forces not of one’s own making. This one costs nothing to get if you already have it, but if you don’t have it, you can’t really acquire it. If you do lack talent, that doesn’t mean you can’t write; but it does limit how successful you are likely to be at writing. (Then again, some very poorly-written books have made some very large sums of money!) It’s also very difficult to know whether you really have talent; people tell me I do, so I suppose I believe them.

The second is practice. You must write and keep on writing. You must write many things in many contexts, and continue to write despite various pressures and obstacles trying to stop you from writing. Reading is also part of this process, as we learn new ways to use words by seeing how others have used them. In fact, you should read more words than you write.

The third is devotion. If you are to truly write well, you must pour your heart and soul into what you write. I can tell fairly quickly whether someone is serious about writing or not by seeing how they react to the metaphor I like to use: “I carve off shards of my soul and assemble them into robots that I release into the world; and when the robots fail, I wonder whether I have assembled them incorrectly, or if there is something fundamentally wrong with my soul itself.” Most people react with confusion. Serious writers nod along in agreement.

The fourth is criticism. You must seek out criticism from a variety of sources, you must accept that criticism, and you must apply it in improving your work in the future. You must avoid becoming defensive, but you must also recognize that disagreement will always exist. You will never satisfy everyone with what you write. The challenge is to satisfy as much of your target audience as possible.

And therein lies the paradox: For when you have devoted your heart and soul into a work, receiving criticism on it can make you want to shut down, wanting to avoid that pain. And thus, you stop practicing, and you stop improving.

What can be done about this?

I am told that it helps to “get a thick skin”, but seeing as I’ve spent the better part of my life trying to do that and failed completely, this may not be the most useful advice. Indeed, even if it can be done it may not be worth it: The most thick-skinned people I know of are generally quite incompetent at whatever they do, because they ignore criticism. There are two ways to be a narcissist: One is to be so sensitive to criticism that you refuse to hear it; the other is to be so immune to criticism that it has no effect on you. (The former is “covert narcissism”, the latter is “overt narcissism”.)

One thing that does seem to help is learning to develop some measure of detachment frrom your work, so that you can take criticism of your work as applying to that work and not to yourself. Usually the robots really are just misassembled, and there’s nothing wrong with your soul.

But this can be dangerous as well: If you detach yourself too much from your work, you lose your devotion to it, and it becomes mechanically polished but emotionally hollow. If you optimize over and over to what other people want, it eventually stops being the work that had meaning for you.

Perhaps what ultimately separates good writers from everyone else is not what they can do, but what they feel they must do: Serious writers feel a kind of compulsion to write, an addiction to transferring thoughts into words. Often they don’t even particularly enjoy it; they don’t “want” to write in the ordinary sense of the word. They simply must write, feeling as though they die or go mad if they ever were forced to stop. It is this compulsion that gets them to persevere in the face of failure and rejection—and the self-doubt that rejection drives.

And if you don’t feel that compulsion? Honestly, maybe you’re better off than those of us who do.