Happy New Year

Here's wishing all of you a safe, happy, and prosperous New Year.

I've taken a few days off from working (a little blogging and a little studying for CFA but that's all). But tomorrow it's back on the hamster wheel.

Two of my revise and resubmits are coming back to me from my coauthors- both require a bit of work on my part, but not much. I also have two papers I'd like to have ready to go for the FMA submission deadline. One is with a former student and was part of her dissertation. We've been working on it for the last 3 months. The other was a pilot study another student and I did a while back with a small data set - we've now expanded the data set significantly, with a lot more analysis.

So, I'll be busy the next few weeks. It's good to get back in the saddle.

The "Shotgun" Approach

Recently, I made a short post about a rejection we got from a journal, and noted that we'd "make a few changes and send it out to another journal". Robert Jensen (emeritus professor of accounting at Trinity University, and one of the earliest academic bloggers) picked up on this and made some very insightful comments on the research "Shotgun approach"

Most academics still actively seeking publication in research journals are playing the same game.

Think of each shotgun pellet as a research paper which in modern times is generally a co-authored paper that gives rise to more pellets (i.e., more papers) loaded into the shotgun shell. The "Shotgun Game" (my definition) is analogous to standing at one end of a football field and firing a 12-gage into the air while hoping that one or more of the tiny pellets will fall down on a target beyond the opposite goal line. At first the target is a very small Tier 1 academic journal target. There may even be several of small targets of about the same Tier 1 small size, especially when foreign journals are allowed to be targets. The game may be replayed several times with substituted Tier 1 targets until the player and/or the referees grow weary of repeated plays at the Tier 1 level. Then the player moves up to Tier 2 journals that have targets twice the size of Tier 1 journals and are, accordingly, easier (not necessarily easy) to hit. Then there are Tier 3 journals, Tier 4 journals, and on and on. Ultimately there are conference proceedings with targets that take up half a football field and are easy to hit even when played by blind researchers. Each shell fired is reloaded with pellets that missed the targets on earlier plays of the game.

Read the whole thing here (it's about a quarter of the way down, and the the easiest way to find it is to search on the page for Unknown Professor).

His comments, and those of the commenters who chime in, are pretty much on target. Unfortunately, Professor Jensen makes one mistake: he thinks I'm now tenured (I'm not yet). At my school, both the number and the quality of my publications count (unfortunately, they place more weight on numbers than quality). So, my interests are best served by getting stuff out quickly, particularly since I will likely go up for tenure in the next couple of years.

I admit, this strategy imposes some costs on the profession as a whole (particularly for the poor referees that have to read the stuff I submit). And the work I'm submitting isn't terrible - it's just admittedly not up to the standards I'd like to maintain in a perfect world. Were I aiming for tenure at a "top" research school, it definitely wouldn't be an optimal strategy.

However, here at Unknown University, quality counts within the department (quality meaning publications in either first or high second-tier journals), but numbers count within the larger college and with the Dean (yes, a Dean is someone who can't read but can count). And while Unknown Son was undergoing cancer treatment, I simply didn't have the energy to work on "big" projects. So, I started a lot of smaller things. They're not great, but they'll get published somewhere, and my dean will have things to count.

But I do hope to kick up my research in terms of quality (and I'll have to to get the tenure vote of at least one of the senior faculty in my department). I currently have three revise-and-resubmits that should all be resubmitted within the next month (unfortunately, all at lower-tier journals). Once these are off my desk, I'll have cleared out the "old" material from my research folder, and can start working on the higher-impact stuff.

We've gotten pretty strong positive signals from the editors on two of the three. So if those two hit, I could end up having 5 acceptances in my first eighteen months at the new school. Granted, they're mostly at lower-tier journals, it does give me some cover while I send out some pieces to higher-tier journals.

I agree wholeheartedly Professor Jensen that a great deal of research that gets done would be FAR better served posted on blogs or some Wiki-style forum. But the school I'm at is the one I plan on staying at (it's one of the three target schools I had when I graduated, and it took me eight years and 3 moves post-Ph.D to get here). So, I bite my lip and do what I have to to get tenure.

Nontenured faculty (particularly at lower-tier schools) have a difficult task that involves balancing two competing approaches: the "Shotgun" approach is unfortunately the optimal one for minimizing the risk of not getting tenure, and the "high quality" one (do only research that answers big questions and has a high probability of ending up in "top" journals) that most benefits the profession and makes it likely that they'll eventually end up at top research schools.

But no one ever said it would be easy.

Another Rejection Letter (Sniff!)

Just got aother rejection from a journal. I'm not all that surprised, because it was a pretty good (I think it was ranked #5 in it's area) journal and it was a stretch to send this piece there. But you never know - sometimes you catch a referee (and editor) in the right frame of mind.

Oh well, this just means we make a few changes and send it back out to another journal. I used to panic about this stuff, but I now know that most papers (if they're decently well done) eventually find a home somewhere.

I felt pretty good a couple of weeks back, since I had five pieces under review. But one of them got accepted (darn!) another came back with a revise-and-resubmit, and this one got rejected. So, I'm no longer "Mungo Compliant" - I fall short of the "three paers under review" standard. So it's time to get the R&R's off my desk and back in an editor's hands.

I have five other projects in various stages (two of them are actually somewhat completed working papers), but until they're submitted to a journal somewhere, they're nothing but vaporware.

So it's back to the academic salt mines...

Another Article Accepted!

Seems like I'm on a roll lately (it's a slow roll, but a roll nonetheless). I just heard from a coauthor that a small paper of ours just got accepted. It's at a lower-tier journal, but at least we placed it somewhere (articles are like orphans - if they keep trying, they eventually find homes). The coauthor is a former student of mine who's done pretty well for himself - he started at a lower tier school and has published well over a dozen articles in four years (mostly at lower-tier journals, but one at a top-tier journal in a related discipline and several at just-below top-tier level).

A couple of years ago, my research was just beginning to fire on all cylinders when the Unknown Son was diagnosed with cancer. Then (not surprisingly) I got almost nothing out for the next three years (I was just looking, and there's gap in my vita that's exactly three years long). But over the last year and a half, I've gotten three publications and four other papers under review. It's not an earth-shattering output, and I'd certainly like to be publishing in better-quality journals. But since I was mostly cleaning out my backlog (and some of the ideas had gone stale while The Boy was sick), I'll take it.

At the school I'm at, quality is valued but numbers count too (after all, one definition of a Dean is "a person who can count but can't read").

Now I have some cover to work on longer-term projects that have a decent chance at higher-quality journals. I was just looking at my research file and I currently have four projects under way, and hope to finish 2-3 of then by December. If I do, and I get one or two more publications by the next fall, I should have a pretty good shot at tenure.

And since the Unknown Wife has told me in no uncertain terms that we're NOT moving again, I have a lot of incentive.

Like they say down South, "If Momma Ain't Happy, Ain't NOBODY Happy!"

More Resources For Grad Students

Ph.D. programs are fundamentally different than undergraduate or masters programs - mostly because they're preparing students for careers as researcher and teachers. A significant portion of my traffic comes from people either looking for information about Ph.D. programs in finance and economics. A second, smaller group of readers are looking for info on one or more particular grad-school issues. So, whenever I come across things that might be useful to these groups, I try to post them here. So, here are some of the latest things I've come across:

Eric Rasmusen is one of my favorite economists. His text on Games and Information was an invaluable resource during my time in the Ph.D. program. He also has a very well written short piece on writing. He aslo has a blog here that touches on economics, law, and faith (and a pretty broad span of other topics).

Along those lines, Kwan Choi (at the time, the editor of the Review of International Economics) has put together a pretty good collection of pieces on the academic publishing process at How To Publish In Top Journals. Note: it also contains helpful suggestions on dealing with referee comments, being a good referee, and so on.

Finally, assuming you get into a doctoral program, here are some things you probably shouldn't say at your dissertation defense.

Enough blogging - back to work. I have data to torture.

A Revise and Resubmit

Looks like I get to end the week on a good note. I just got a "revise and resubmit" in the mail. For those not in academia, this means that an article I sent to a journal made it past the first round of reviews. The referee gave us a lot of issues to address, but nothing too difficult. with a bit of work, we should be able to address the referee's concerns and get it sent back to the journal in the next few weeks.

So I might well be starting the new academic year with another publication. It's nothing earth shattering, but at this point I figure another two publications (this one and one other) in the next year should make getting tenure a very good probability.

Another Paper Finished

I made another step toward clearing out my backlog of unfinished papers today. I had a small project that's been in the works for a couple of years. For some reason, it kept getting pushed to the back burner by one coauthor or another (and more often than not, it was me doing the pushing).

This week, we finally said "enough", and we did the necesary work to finish the darn thing. I just finished the "final" rewrite and sent it to my coauthors. All they need to do is check to make sure that the sections I rewrote don't have any serious errors (grammatical or otherwise). So, it should get submitted sometime this week. All in all, it makes for a pretty good start to Spring Break.

And that will bring me up to three papers under review (all submitted this semester). Then I'll be in compliance with Mungo's Rule.

As an aside, the paper that got rejected earlier this week has already been sent out to another journal.

And as a reward, I think I'll check out the matinee showing of The 300 tomorrow.

A Quick Rejection

That was fast! I submitted a paper to a journal a few days ago, and I already got a rejection - the fastest one I've ever gotten.

Actually, it was what is known as a "desk rejection", where the journal editors make an initial judgement that the paper is not appropriate for the journal before sending it out to a referee. The decision wasn't surprising, since they editor pointed out a problem with the paper we were already aware of.

But, we didn't mind too much. In fact, I wish more editors did that (not reject my papers, of course, but make a quick decision). It's far better to get a rejection quickly than to go through the alternative: to have the paper sent out to a referee who takes several months to get back to you, get a revise and resubmit, satisfy the referee's demands, and THEN to have the editor tell you that the paper "doesn't make a significant contribution." That way I can either fix the problem or send it out to another journal quickly without having to wait six months or a year.

I know the editors of the journal are trying to increase the quality of the journal. Making quick editorial decisions like this are a good step - if authors know they'll get a quick decision (and yes, it was a reasonable one), they'll be more likely to send their work there rather than to a close substitute journal. And more submissions means more choices, and therefore higher quality publications.

As Shakespeare would say, "If the deed t'were done, tis best t'were done quickly."

At the other extreme, my colleagues and I have all had similar experiences at a particular journal that often takes 12-14 months to get a review back. That's not unheard of at econ journals, but it is WAY too long for a finance one (most of the better finance journals have a 2-3 month turnaround). As a result, we've all decided that we'll send papers there only if there's no reasonable alternative.

Now we figure out whether to fix the issues the editors mentioned or to just send it out to the next journal as is and roll the dice. I know one thing - it's not doing us any good on my desk, after all.