Leadership in Scholarship: Editors’ Appointments and the Profession’s Narrative

Ali Onder, Sergey Popov and Sascha Schweitzer
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Sascha Schweitzer: University of Bayreuth

No 2021-05, Working Papers in Economics & Finance from University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth Business School, Economics and Finance Subject Group

Abstract: Academic journals disseminate new knowledge, and therefore can influence the direction and composition of ongoing research by choosing what to publish. We study the change in the topic structure of papers published in the American Economic Review (AER) after the appointments of editors and coeditors of the AER between 1985 and 2011 using a textual analysis of accepted publications. We compare AER’s topic structure to that of the other top general interest journals. The appointment of new AER editors, while accompanied by a minor co-movement of AER topics towards topics of editors’ post-appointment publications, is not an indicator of editors’ personal taste in topics, but rather indicates the desire of those who appoint editors to premediate trends in other Top 5 journals.

Keywords: Academia; Knowledge Dissemination; Journals; Editors; Publications; Latent Dirichlet Allocation; Topic Analysis. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 A14 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40
Date: 2021-05-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sog
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