Global academic journals
When John Weyant and I took over as editors of Energy Economics in 2003, it was an old-boys club. We decided to judge papers only on their quality, ignoring their provenance. This strategy paid off: Energy Economics was found to be the most geographically-diverse of all economics journals in 2021. This is, of course, partly because of the subject: Energy is a necessary good, economically more important in poorer countries. But our policy is another part of the reason, and I am proud of fostering academic talent outside the usual places.
The spread of academic expertise across the globe is a good thing. Students get taught better closer to home. Policymakers get better advice. But there are downsides too. I discuss three: language, money, and defence.
Research is broadcast in English. I have studied English as a second language for 50 years, while my native tongue is similar. Other people are not so lucky. Expressing yourself clearly in a foreign, almost alien language is hard. Fortunately, AI tools are getting better but at the risk of standardizing expressions and raising the prospects of unintended plagiarism.
There are other concerns, though. AI is terrible at jargon (as are human language editors, whose specialty is English). If you do not really understand the meaning of words, then it is easy to mistake one data series for another. We have seen an increase in the number of cases where authors swap one variable for another; or argue that one series is a proxy for an unrelated one.
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’”
We are not in Wonderland and these are not proxies. I think we should call them HumptyDumpties.
Money is the second issue. Relationships between authors and between authors and editors have always been fraught — frequently around patronage, sometimes around sexual favours — but this used to be local. The internet has destroyed distance, the pandemic has shattered localities. A new factor has thus come into play: Large disparities in income. Universities in East and West Asia now pay substantial publication bonuses, with poorly paid but well-educated scholars in South Asia in between. I think this is a minor offense: The quality of research is more important than who pretends to have conducted it.* That said, if your name is not on your paper, then you do not suffer the reputational loss if the paper is found to be fraudulent.
Editors are not well-paid either, one reason why publishers are so very profitable. There have certainly been failed attempts to bribe editors — there are persistent rumours that some of these attempts succeeded.
This brings me to the third and final issue. Rob Socolow once described Princeton as an old university with many lines of defense. (Princeton is from 1746 but then Rob is from the USA.) We have seen the emergence of many young universities with presumably few lines of defense, in countries with a short history of academic research and regulators who do not really understand the sector. At Energy Economics, we reject papers if we suspect fraud. We only notify the university of the authors if we have evidence of fraud. Many universities acknowledge receipt, some report back on the results of the internal investigation. But there are also universities that seem to ignore reports of misconduct by their employees — and I was once attacked by a Head of Department for daring to question the integrity of her faculty.
Editors are gatekeepers. We are also busy. Our main objective is to protect the reputation of ourselves and our journals. We would rather mistakenly reject a good paper than mistakenly accept a bad one. Although we remain wedded to the policy of judging a paper on its quality and its quality alone, the misbehaviour of entire departments sometimes makes me doubt the wisdom of that policy.
*Clarification: Authorship is irrelevant for science. Calculus is great, whether invented by Newton or Leibniz. Authorship matters greatly to authors and their employers. Adding fake authors to your paper dilutes your status and diminishes the reputation of your university. Adding your name to a paper you did not write is embellishment that violates labour law.