There are many advantages to making your working papers available on-line. It allows you to get feedback, it creates exposure for a paper, and it allows you to take credit before the time consuming journal publishing process finally lets your paper see the light of day as an Article. Theoretically, all of this would work best if there were one system where all these papers are stored. Indeed in law and in economics everyone seems to have converged on SSRN as that place.
That’s Erik Voeten writing at the Monkey Cage. Does anyone know of similar archives for psychology or public health papers? I made it through graduate school in psychology without hearing the term ‘working paper.’ The journal publishing process was the standard path for graduate students and faculty. Pre-publication manuscripts were only passed around to a small group of colleagues via email or a ‘journal club.’ Have I been missing out on a thriving network? A quick Google search suggests not.
If not, can anyone explain why working papers have not caught on in psychology and public health as they have in economics and political science?
I am not certain about this, but I suspect it has to do with the differing traditions of information dissemination in the two fields. In economics (I don’t know anything about law), as you hinted at in the post, posting draft papers on Web sites is encouraged, and one can present a paper at numerous “brown bag seminars” before the paper is finally submitted for publication. When the paper actually appears in the print journal, it is more of an afterthought, because all of the reputation-building and most of the peer-review has already informally taken place.
In public health (I don’t know anything about psychology), it is a little different because medical journals explicitly discourage the practice of presenting a study at multiple conferences or seminars (and many journals request that you disclose the name of the conference or conferences where you have presented). I think this has to do with the emphasis in medicine on “scoops” and being the first to publish this or that finding. Your presenting the findings at a conference undercuts the value of the publication to the medical journal because it undercuts the paper’s contribution to the medical journal’s ability to attract advertising dollars (which are critical to a medical journal’s budget, and therefore critical to the medical societies that publish the journals). I would bet that advertising accounts for a teeny tiny proportion of the budget at journals like AER, QJE, and PE.
Well, that’s my guess. I’d be interested in hearing other thoughts.