{"id":533,"date":"2009-01-09T14:26:51","date_gmt":"2009-01-09T18:26:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/?p=533"},"modified":"2009-01-09T15:02:47","modified_gmt":"2009-01-09T19:02:47","slug":"how-are-the-mighty-fallen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/how-are-the-mighty-fallen\/","title":{"rendered":"How Are the Mighty Fallen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joshua Gans<\/a> writes to point out a paper he wrote with George Shepherd, “How Are the Mighty Fallen: Rejected Classic Articles by Leading Economists” (link to pdf<\/a>), about the experience some leading economists have had with peer review:<\/p>\n

\nWe asked over 140 leading economists, including all living winners of the Nobel Prize and John Bates Clark Medal, to describe instances in which journals rejected their papers. We hit a nerve. More than 60 percent responded, many with several blistering pages. Paul Krugman expressed the tone of many letters: “Thanks for the opportunity to let off a bit of steam.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The paper is extremely readable (and entertaining), if you have any interest in peer review. Among other tidbits: an extraordinary list of rejected papers, many of them among the classics of economics; the estimate from Krugman that 60% of his papers are rejected on first try; the remarkable story of George Akerlof’s Nobel Prize-Winning paper “The Market for Lemons”, rejected by three separate journals before being published; the two rejections of the famous Black-Scholes options pricing paper, also Nobel Prize-Winning; Krugman’s comment that “I am having a terrible time with my current work on economic geography: referees tell me that it’s obvious, it’s wrong, and anyway they said it years ago.” There’s much more.<\/p>\n

Addendum: Joshua also pointed me to a retrospective on the article (pdf here<\/a>), which makes for interesting followup reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joshua Gans writes to point out a paper he wrote with George Shepherd, “How Are the Mighty Fallen: Rejected Classic Articles by Leading Economists” (link to pdf), about the experience some leading economists have had with peer review: We asked over 140 leading economists, including all living winners of the Nobel Prize and John Bates… Continue reading How Are the Mighty Fallen<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-future-of-science-2","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}