Thursday, August 23, 2012

Ingelfinger Rule

Until I read this blogpost I didn't know this had a name: "The Ingelfinger Rule". Apparently, Franz Ingelfinger was the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. In 1969 he ruled that authors couldn't be published in his journal if they engaged in pre-publication or even media publicity around their findings prior to their article seeing print. This was for purely monopolistic reasons. But it is a rule that has become very entrenched across the biomedical and broader biological academic journal world. It hasn't had any influence at all in the world of economics, where prepublication is the norm. Occasionally, economists engaged in interdisciplinary work find that they can't get published because they weren't aware of these very different cultural rules.

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