Add Papers to Your academia.edu Profile

Academia.edu is still I think a somewhat experimental social media website. It hasn't got a lot of momentum with faculty members yet - most of the participants are grad students. This is true at Crawford School too. 27 Crawford people are on academia.edu but there are only four faculty members and two post-docs among them. This is because I think the website is most useful for people who don't

Membership of the International Society for Ecological Economics

Doing some more work on my article on ecological economics. I was actually surprised to find that ISEE membership is at the strongest point I've seen it with 3049 members worldwide. There have been booms and busts in membership over time with particularly successful international conferences raising membership for a while and lots of changes of membership structure and location of the society

h(5,2) - the Best Citation Metric for Economics?

Glenn Ellison has written a paper titled: "http://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_3188.html">How Does the Market Use Citation Data? The Hirsch Index in Economics" on the use of Hirsch type citation metrics in economics. An author's Hirsch index is equal to h if they have published at least h papers cited at least h times. Ellison argues that generally economists write fewer papers than natural

Nature Publishing Group Goes Head to Head with PLoS ONE

Nature Publishing Group is launching yet another journal: Scientific Reports. It is an open access journal with the same $US1,350 publication fee as PLoS ONE. Nature recently launched another journal: Nature Communications that charges a $US5,000 open access fee, which is higher than any of the PLoS journals and the highest publication fee that I've seen. It's not a pure open access journal

Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences

A new journal for a new academic society: Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences. I've long thought it strange that there has been no professional society for environmental studies. Well, apart from the International Society for Ecological Economics of course :) This makes academic job searches in environmental studies a bit more challenging than in other fields, for example. Unlike

New Private College of the Humanities in the UK

An interesting development in the face of the tremendous rise in tuition fees at public universities in the UK: "The New College of the Humanities. This will be a private college that is part of the University of London. It will grant London degrees and use their library facilities etc. There is star founding faculty of fourteen professors including well-known names like Richard Dawkins, Partha

ARC to Abolish Existing Journal Ranking System

The Australian Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Kim Carr put out apress release today describing changes to be made in the 2012 ERA research assessment exercise compared to the 2010 ERA. One of the changes is: "The refinement of the journal quality indicator to remove the prescriptive A*, A, B and C ranks". This follows consultation on changes to the ranking scheme. "The

Castro e Silva and Teixeira

An interesting paper by Castro e Silva and Teixeira reviews the evolution of themes and types of papers in Ecological Economics over the first 20 years of its existence. The paper joins other bibliometric analyses of the journal including Luzadis et al. (2010), Costanza et al. (2004), and Ma and Stern (2006). Two of their main findings are that:There has been an increase in the number of

Invited to Publish a Chapter in an In-Tech Book

Open Access chapters in books with pay to publish fees seems to be a new trend. I got an invite to contribute a chapter to a book published by In-Tech. The publication fee is Euro 590. The book is available for free online but a hardcopy is mailed to each author. What I found to be even weirder is this statement:"To preserve the integrity of the review process the identity of the editor will be

Landmark Papers Boost Citations of Authors' Existing Papers

In an article titled "How Citation Boosts Promote Scientific Paradigm Shifts and Nobel Prizes", Amin Mazloumian et al. analyse the citation records of 124 Nobel Prize winners of the last two decades. They find that following the publication of a landmark highly cited paper, the existing papers of these authors receive increased citations. This effect was stronger for the Nobelists than for a

A Small World or Not?

Academia often seems like a small world where everyone knows everyone else. But http://www.linkedin.com/profile/edit?trk=hb_tab_pro_top">my experiences on LinkedIn suggest the opposite. Most of the people I am connected to on LinkedIn are only connected to perhaps 1-2 people that I am already connected to and when I browse their lists of connections there are normally only 1-2 other people that I

Director of LSE Resigns over Libya Connections

As an alumnus of LSE I got an e-mail this morning announcing that the Director had stepped down. Here is the full announcement. Here is more background of what must have forced him out.It's strange that it was fashionable in the last few years to be involved with Libya in Western circles and now again it isn't.

"Academic Age" of Authors of American Economic Review Articles

Torgler and Piatti have written a massive paper on the American Economic Review with heaps of tables, graphs, and regression analyses. This is what most caught my eye:Academic age is the number of years since an author got their PhD. The modal author of an AER article is about 4 years post PhD and there's quite a low probability of publication more than 20 years post-PhD. Maybe this is why people

How Does CSIRO Compare to Australian Universities?

The Australian government http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2011/02/era-report-released.html">recently released the ERA Report, which compared research at Australian universities to the rest of the world. But this report does not evaluate the performance of CSIRO Australia's system of natural laboratories.An article by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Batterham">Robin Batterham in the

Article on John List

Saw this article on John List linked at Marginal Revolution and decided to link from here too. List has contributed to both environmental and experimental economics and is famous among job candidates in economics for "publishing up" from his initial job at Central Florida U.

IAmScientist Again

I finally added a profile to IAmScientist, which I mentioned a long time ago in what turned out to be my most popular post.I was impressed by how it found links to my publications on the web. The site then generates an abstract for each publication. But it doesn't generate links to those publications on the web. You have to upload a copy to IAmScientist.Also its communication and friending

Researcher ID to be More Integrated into Web of Knowledge

Researcher ID allows researchers to "claim" their articles on the Web of Knowledge. Though you can view a researcher's profile if you know their ID number or they provide you with a link, this feature hasn't been integrated with the citation index.Thomson-Reuters plan to change this. The integration is pretty superficial at this stage. Only when you go to an article's full details will you see

ERA Report Released

The ARC (Australian Research Council) has released the ERA report (Excellence in Research for Australia). I've blogged before about this process. The Australian newspaper provides a graphic of the ranking of universities:ANU comes top and Melbourne second which isn't a surprise. UQ is third though which is higher than many may have expected. Melbourne is top ranked in economics though. That isn't

Limits to Craziness

Should some academic papers not be published just because they seem too crazy? There is an interesting debate in the New York Times about whether a psychology paper claiming experimental evidence for people being able to predict supposedly random future events should have been published or not. I am in favor of papers that use solid methods being published, however, crazy the hypothesis that they

Paul Burke's Graduation

I went along to Paul Burke's graduation as Doctor of Philosophy at ANU on Friday. As you can see I was in "civilian clothing" and sat in the audience. Here the hooding ceremony is performed by the Chancellor of the University (Gareth Evans) rather than by the graduate's PhD adviser,* as is the practice in the US. Actually, I hadn't been to a graduation in Australia before and there were some