A Century of American Economic Review ― Insights on Critical Factors in Journal Publishing

By using information collected from numerous American Economic Review publications from the last 100 years, Torgler and Piatti examine the top publishing institutions to determine their most renowned AER papers based on citation success. Areas of interest include how often an individual can publish in the AER, how equally successful citations are distributed and who the top AER publishing authors are. The book explores what the level of cooperation is among authors and what drives systems such as the alphabetical name ordering. Torgler and Piatti critically examine the individual characteristics of AER authors, editors, editorial board members and referees and even tackle more intricate details such as the frequency of female publications in the AER. The authors observe and analyse the relationship between academic age and publication performance to see if there is any pattern on these factors and citation success. The book then goes on to analyse data concerning awards, and whether awards can increase the probability of publishing in the AER at a later stage.

Benno Torgler is Professor at the QUT Business School, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, and Adjunct Professor at the EBS Universitat fur Wirtschaft und Recht, Germany. He is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts. He is passionate about the sociology of science.

Marco Piatti is a PhD student at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. His research is in behavioural and experimental economics, specifically in credence good markets, economics of science, microeconometrics and sportometrics. He received his BBus(Econ) with Distinction in 2010 and his Master by Research (Economics) in 2012 from QUT.