Citations

Edward Lopez discusses the new Policy for Submissions at Economic Inquiry under the editorship R. Preston McAfee; or at least, lets McAfee announce himself. The real germ of his presentation comes in this Quote:

Journal time to publication lags have become embarrassing. Many authors have 5 year submission-to-print stories. More insidious, in my view, is the gradual morphing of the referees from evaluators to anonymous co-authors. Referees request increasingly extensive rev! isions. Usually these represent improvements, but the process takes a lot of time and effort, and the end result is often worse owing to its committee-design. Authors, knowing referees will make them rewrite the paper, are sometimes sloppy with the submission. This feedback loop - submitting a sloppy paper since referees will require rewriting combined with a need to fix all the sloppiness - has led to our current misery. Moreover, the expectation that referees will rewrite papers, combined with sloppy submissions, makes refereeing extraordinarily unpleasant. We - the efficiency-obsessed academic discipline - have the least efficient publication process.

Dani Rodrik cites a Paper by Glenn Ellison expressing the decreasing Submissions to academic Journals, Rodrik himself being an editor of The Review of Economics and Statistics. It is fair indication that the Journal reviewing process has become too difficult, defeating the desires of Authors with limited Time. It is made even worse by the fact that Journal referees co-opt in the limited Time allowance. This is one real Side of the Problem.

The other Side of the Problem lay in the fact that Journals have a decreased Readership, due to the relevance that almost any Kind of data is more accessible online. The element of trouble existent with the online access to Information is the lack of Vetting of the information. Citation of Online source suffers from this lack, but Journals are being reduced to the sole preoccupation of Research for documentation of Papers. The McAfee Proposition brings a potential hazard to this usage, as the search for Journal Fill may become an element of the Vetting process. Wikipedia and other such Websites attempt to introduce some form of Vetting process; the major detriment to effective use of these Sites being the refusal of Academia to endorse material there.
My idea is for Journals to affiliate with Wikipedia, and other such Sites, and design a Box and Icon format to encase any Information that a respectable academic Journal has responsibly vetted. This would grant these Sites potential for being cited in academic Papers. This remains a far distance from what I had planned to write in this Post, but I will simply author another Post Today, if I have the Time; this is the functional utility of the Online process. lgl