Our new study poses a conundrum: in a professional market (for economists), having more scholars pay attention to your research raises your reputation and your salary. Conditional on that attention, though, writing more papers lowers your reputation — but it raises your salary!
The question is why writing more (essentially ignored) papers has opposite effects on reputation and salary? Are university administrators ignorant, rewarding something visible that in fact reduces the scholar’s quality, as measured by his/her colleagues? We tested lots of explanations for the anomaly, but none described it well. The results suggest that there might be room for a Billy Beane (see Moneyball) of academe.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Not sure about economics.
In medicine the cause and effect are reversed: The higher you rise in the hierarchy the easier it is to put you name on a paper one of your minions is wiriting. Frequently the “great man” has only a vague idea about the subject or the findings of the paper.
In order to win the lottery you have to buy a ticket.
All the research, concentration and writing skill in the world won’t help you if a topic isn’t relevant and well received at the time. More often than not, good papers will fly under the radar without raising your reputation while possibly hurting it. Like voting, writing a paper that most likely won’t help your reputation provides little to no utility. In order to keep professors writing, schools provide incentives in salary form for those that write. Universities are ‘buying’ these tickets(papers) in hopes that one will permeate the cultural zeitgeist bringing them fame and fortune.
More notoriety = more students = more money. Everyone responds to incentives.
Full disclosure – I’m an academic and have some interest in perceptions of expertise, so my thoughts may be biased.
People are “haters.” We don’t perceive positive and negative in a perfectly symmetrical way. Research on services marketing suggests that each piece of negative word of mouth is worth 6 positive pieces of word of mouth. Similarly, we instinctively believe that bad news sells better than good news in tabloids and newspapers. So that’s the start point.
Now, consider how academics are trained. We sit in seminars and try our best to tear papers apart. We look for flaws in theoretical arguments, flaws in methodology, etc. There’s no perfect paper, and we’re trained to look for those weaknesses, so the flaws become salient. Whenever I look at reviewer comments, this becomes more evident.
If an author publishes more, it’s harder to get publications only in the top journals. Publications in lower tier journals are automatically looked down upon. And even those in top journals are scrutinized. As an author publishes more, it’s more and more likely that the content builds on itself, so there is some diminishing returns in terms of how novel the findings are. Publish more, and it’s easier to find more negative data points, while the positive data points are likely to be somewhat redundant. Those negative points are also more salient and weighted more heavily, particularly among one’s peers.
Now how does salary get determined? Someone in administration looks at your CV, and it’s not likely that they are experts in your area of research. So, they get a list of publication impact factors, and then count the number of high impact pubs, and get an idea of how good someone is, w/out really looking at the specific content of those pubs. It’s different information that’s being used.
What do you guys think?
I would be curious to know what else is correlated with writing more papers. For example, I’m guessing younger people not only have fewer publications, but also publish at a slower rate. Also, I’m sure some subspecialties have greater rates of paper publishing than others. Could something like this be the real cause of the lower reputation/ higher salary problem?
Dr. Hamermesh,
Didn’t Adam Smith give an explanation for this? Decompose your rewards into wages and approbation — holding constant rewards, money wages & approbation must necessarily be negatively correlated.
One more point. While it might seem as if “in order to win the lottery, you have to buy a ticket.” … is this necessarily so. The Salahis got into the white house without a ticket. How? Sociology 101– norms- shared expectations of appropriate conduct i.e., no one would have expected it i.e., everyone expected “guests” to be invited–
I have always found it absurd of how the Universities in U.S. pay more emphasis to publish more papers rather than emphasizing on improving the quality of papers published which is in contrast to European Universities which emphasize more on the quality of paper being published…..
I don’t see any real gain from publishing more papers as from a research point of view you don’t get a thorough understanding of the subject in hand…..