Friday, August 17, 2012

When to Put Out a Working Paper?

In the past I usually put out a working paper version of my research at the same time as submitting the paper to a journal. I assumed that if I thought the paper was ready to be refereed then it was ready to be read by a broader audience too. When I was looking for a job I thought that it was important to get stuff onto my CV as fast as possible. I still usually sent papers, and especially single authored papers, to colleagues for comment before getting to this stage. But some discussions with colleagues, reading blogs, and noting the that some working papers are in fact more or less identical to the published version has made rethink this practice.

Some colleagues reported that they either waited for the first round of comments from a journal before putting up a working paper or that they waited for final acceptance at a journal.

So recently, I have been following a mix of these two strategies, which is one reason why I haven't put up many working papers recently. But I'm still not sure what the best strategy should be.

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