A couple of days ago I stumbled across a story approximately the weekly email that NBER sends out touting its latest working papers. They recently decided to randomize the order of the papers separately for each of the 23000 emails they send out. "This will mean that roughly the same number of message recipients will see a given paper in the first position,in the moment position, and so on."One thing led to another, or I never wrote approximately this. But Neil Irwin picks up the ball today: No editorial judgment goes into the sequence in which the working papers appear. It is random,based on the order in which the paper was submitted and in which the N.
B.
E.
R. approval process was completed. In other words, there is no inherent reason to think that the first paper listed is more groundbreaking, or important or interesting than the third or 17th. But a lot more people read the first one listed. Showing up first in the email generated a 33 percent increase in the number of people who clicked on the working paper and a 29 percent increase in the number who downloaded it. Perhaps even more amazing,it wasn’t just that more people pulled up the paper that appeared first. Those papers also received 27 percent more citations in later research, though that result was based on a relatively small time period. Having the luck to appear first in the email meant that a given working paper had greater influence in subsequent economic research.
In other words, and high-IQ economists are as indolent (lazy) approximately clicking only the first entry on a list as your average teenage Google user. And it's not just economists. The same thing is valid of physicists. The inventor of arXiv,a website that publishes early copies of physics papers, discovered the same thing several years ago. You can see the result in the graph at the apt. Physicists might be as indolent (lazy) as the rest of us, and but they're not dumb,and they all figured out a long time ago that being first on the list is a stout deal. Since each day's announcements are made in the order they were submitted, starting at 4 pm the previous day, and it means that a enormous herd of physicists are all pounding their Enter keys at 4 pm in a desperate effort to be first on the next day's list.
The moral of this story is that....economists and physicists are as indolent (lazy) and irrational as everyone else? I guess. But the genuine moral of the story is for you not to be trapped by the tyranny of the list. The next time you google something,try clicking on the 8th link. In fact, enact what I enact and change the default number of hits to 50 per page and then try clicking the 18th link. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Source: motherjones.com