Learned friends

If you aren’t too concerned about the need for a screening process, it isn’t that hard to simply roll your own clearing house.

In semantics, which admittedly is a pretty small field relative to political science, Chris Barker and Peter Laserholn set up the Semantics Archive without too much trouble. (Though it did need a bit of funding, and a bit of advertising to get everyone to use it. And the latter is much easier in a small field than a large field.)

Or, if people are in the habit of posting draft papers to their own websites, you can set up a database that keeps track of what’s available where. I haven’t tried doing that in its entirity (though it would be an interesting challenge), but I did try something almost as useful for philosophy. With the help of some useful software I scan all of the pages (that I know about) that contain online philosophy papers and keep a blog where I report the changes in the last 24 hours. (The blog, in case you’re interested, is here.)

I haven’t advertised this blog much, but it is growing steadily, and I think its led to people who post papers getting more feedback than they otherwise would. (Not that I’ve done any actual research to check this.)

The trick is to (a) have a culture where people are at least prepared to post papers to their own pages, (b) have a database of all the places where people do post their own papers, and (c’) have someone prepared to scan all those pages daily (or less frequently, but daily is ideal) and report back. If you don’t have (a) then a central clearing house probably won’t make much difference. Obviously (b) is hard work, though it’s largely a startup cost. And (c’) is a running cost, though when I don’t bother to stop and check the quality of the papers I’m linking to, it’s only about 15 minutes a day for the areas I cover. That would go up if you tried to cover something larger, but perhaps not dramatically.

Basically if you have a culture of people posting papers to their websites, then all the labour you need to maintain a blog that lists all the new work could be provided by a grad student doing less work than they’d normally put in teaching. If it’s a useful project, I’m sure some school somewhere in the world will spare one grad student a year from teaching to maintain the blog.

I’d actually meant to include the Feldstein effect as a possible explanation and forgot. I think you’re right – it’s quite important that you have key figures in the field who are willing to associate themselves with the project to get the ball rolling.

Brian – v. interesting. Another issue that scares some pol. scientists (although they’re getting increasingly bolder), is copyright issues, and whether the journal in question will get annoyed if they put copies of their mss on-line pre- or post-publication. Although some journals take an enlightened attitude – _International Organization_, which is one of the biggies, specifically grants you rights in the contract to put articles it publishes on your own website.

This is a very interesting discussion and does raise some hard questions. I don’t have any better suggestions than what’s already been posted re why it is that working papers are more common in some fields than others. (And it was correctly stated, sociology does not have much of a culture of working papers.)

I just thought I’d add an additional point, because I wonder if it’s related. My impression is that traveling across the country to give seminar presentations on works-in-progress is much more common in econ than in soc (these are two areas with which I’m fairly familiar so I thought I’d use them as examples). I don’t know if it’s partly simply that econ depts have bigger budgets for seminar series, but I have certainly noticed that while an economist may give half a dozen if not more seminar talks during a year, a sociologist is lucky to have one invitation. My impression is that most sociology depts don’t even have a regular speaker series. I don’t have any data to back up this claim and I don’t even know how many econ depts have a regular speaker series. It would be interesting to see a compilation of depts by discipline on this.

The reason I think this relates to the topic of working papers is because seminars are another way of disseminating one’s work informally before publication. And if a field has the culture of frequent seminar series then it seems like a reasonable next step to value working papers in contrast to a field where works in progress rarely get discussed by peers.

Of course, you could make the opposite argument whereby a field that does not have a seminar series would be more inclined to pursue a working paper culture because it is an important way for authors to get feedback (lacking the option of seminar presentations), but this doesn’t seem to be the case.

This was just a thought I had that I think in some ways may relate to this discussion. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about the seminar culture in cs and other science fields to consider how this works out in those areas.

It is worth noting that SSRN was originally started by financial economists, and other parts of economics were then added. Law was originally added by the law and economics crowd, but that has grown into a full scale legal section. If you look at their home page, they now have sections on accounting, economics, financial economics, law, management, information systems, marketing, and negotiations research. Each one has a group of editors, all major figures in their fields. SSRN says it is devoted to social science. I do not know why fields such as sociology and political science do not simply join up. It would turn SSRN from the value asset that it currently is into a multidisciplinary gold mine.

Henry: some thoughts on the idea of a discipline-wide “clearing house” for working papers in political science. I think the big conferences you refer to (APSA and CPSA both post conference papers on the web) do bring the discipline together in the sense you seeem to mean. Also, several departments (MIT, Chicago, and NYU that I know of) have papers available from some of their seminar series. And at least one subfield association within political science, the methodology division, runs a superb working paper archive. Personally, I’m not sure I want much more “bringing together” than that: I like some decentralization, some cacophony. Or at least, it isn’t clear to me that the scholarly gains of disciplinewide distribution of prepublication material is worth the effort of establishing and maintaining such a node (and I accept that the costs probably aren’t all that high).

Also, I don’t yet share your optimism that scholarly blogs can be trusted to separate the gold from the dross. Maybe, but there is a distinct “echo chamber” quality to such mediating efforts. Sometimes I worry that the so-called blogosphere is merely a refined and articulate variation on how they “elected” leaders in Sparta.

Loren

interesting points – my quick responses. First, you’re right that the APSA meeting websites etc do bring the discipline together – but in a rather scattershot fashion. Not everyone presents there, and not every presenter uploads papers. And that is even more true of the departmental seminar series etc. What I like about the SSRN is precisely that it’s a one-stop-shop, where everyone who does research in law can go if they want to find something. I think that this encourages a working paper culture, which is a good thing imo, for two reasons. First, people in law really know that others are going to have access to working papers, and read them and be influenced, and thus they have an incentive to make them available. Second, I suspect that it actually makes plagiarism less attractive; if I’m a plagiarist, and I rip off a paper from a less well known working paper series and submit it for journal publication, I have some chance of getting away with it, if I’m careful to remove the obvious tell-tale signs, because anonymous reviewers are unlikely to have read the original piece. But becomes a lot trickier if working papers are centralized, so that most people in a subfield or specialization can be expected to have read the original. Or at least, this seems plausible to me.

On the bloggers-as-filters, I’m talking specifically to what Larry does on legal theory blog. He casts his net quite widely, but because he shares some of my interests (e-commerce and Internet law), I can be pretty sure that he’s going to pick up on anything half way interesting that comes out. Of course, the quality of the filtering would depend on the quality of the filterer – but that’s true of all forms of filtering, whether they be journal editors, smaller working paper series & c.

>Cool eh?

And then some.