Microsoft Academic Search Update

Back in December I blogged about Microsoft Academic Search. My conclusion was that though it offered some innovative ways of presenting data, it was still in an early stage of development compared to the offerings from Thomson (Web of Science/Researcher ID), Elsevier (Scopus), and Google (Scholar and Citations).

I recently received an e-mail from the project lead for Microsoft Academic Search. They have merged my various profiles. The number of citations is now 2109 which is similar to the number in Scopus. There are still, however, a lot of publications in the profile that aren't mine. It also says I have collaborated with 147 co-authors. I'd be surprised if the number was greater than 37. Based on Google that is roughly the number. The large number must be because of the extraneous publications. People like me are problematic for disambiguation algorithms of this type as we move around a lot.

Though they didn't point this out to me, it seems that there is a way to correct the record. I submitted corrections to my record. It is a similar approach to the Scopus Author Profile. You can identify which articles are not yours and then submit the info to Microsoft. Similarly, you can request author merges.

Microsoft have also opened their API to users. That's beyond my capabilities I think but very interesting.

So, this is potentially a very interesting service, but still really in the "beta" stage. But then, all author profile services have their issues.

Elsevier Responds to the Boycott

Elsevier have responded to the boycott by producing a new e-mail newsletter for authors. The first issue includes a link to a page about the various open access options that Elsevier offer authors. I think some of the boycotters and their sympathisers simply aren't aware of these options. Elsevier hasn't until now highlighted them very much. So I think this is a positive development. Article transfer is also a good innovation - transferring the peer review reports from a journal that rejects a paper to another journal in the group that might instead be interested rather than setting out requesting new referees all over again.

The Other Side of the Elsevier Story

One of the principal complaints against Elsevier is that they charge too much. The other side of the story is that universities are allocating a smaller and smaller part of their budgets to libraries.

The Rise and Fall of Ecological Economics

Mark Sagoff has written an article with this title in the Breakthrough Journal. This is a new publication of the Breakthrough Institute which is a contrarian but self-described "progressive" think tank that has a large focus on environmental issues.

In the article Sagoff mainly claims that ecological economics started promisingly but got sidetracked by adopting environmental valuation and cost-benefit analysis and is now ignored by everyone. There are lots of other discussions about the history of ecology etc. along the way. Sagoff has been a consistent opponent of cost-benefit analysis. I think the essay is very polemical and overemphasizes some trends while ignoring others. Some ecological economists have adopted mainstream approaches to non-market valuation of the environment for largely pragmatic reasons as described. But this is by no means all or even the majority of ecological economists, especially in Europe. Ecological Economics does publish quite a few papers on valuation but also on all kinds of other topics and approaches. We have always taken a very open-minded and eclectic approach. There has been convergence between ecological and mainstream environmental economics over time, but it hasn't been a one way street.

Personally, I have always been opposed to non-market environmental valuation for both practical and philosophical reasons. I don't believe that it is possible to come up with at all credible prices through these approaches and especially not sustainability-relevant prices. And I don't think CBA should be used for making large societal decisions as they are more about distribution than efficiency. I am all for efficiency though in implementing goals once society has decided on them.

Journal of Economic Surveys 2012

Finally, my paper on interfuel substitution has been published in a formal issue of the journal:

Stern D. I. (2012) Interfuel substitution: A meta-analysis, Journal of Economic Surveys 26(2), 307-331.

It has been online on the journal's website since October 2010. A free working paper version is also available. I first blogged about this paper back in 2009 when the working paper went up. Since then we got a grant from the ARC which will allow me to hire a postdoc to look at the issues raised in that blogpost about climate change models. Specifically, will improved estimates of elasticities of substitution between fuels and between energy and capital make a big difference to predicted costs of climate change policies. I'll keep you posted on that over the next three years! :)

Acceptance Rates in the Top Environmental Economics Journals

How hard is it to get published in the top journals in environmental economics? From a variety of sources:



JEEM is a lot tougher to get into than the other two journals, but they aren't exactly easy.

Papers on Drivers and Trends

What are the most classic journal articles on global drivers and trends of greenhouse gas emissions and anthropogenic climate change? Below are some papers that mostly have a lot of citations. Obviously, I don't agree with the content of all of them, but for this purpose I want to illustrate the evolution of thought on this matter. I've included IPCC scenarios, the environmental Kuznets curve, the emissions convergence literature, and papers by natural scientists.

I'm only just getting started on putting this review together, so will welcome any suggestions! In particular is there a journal article that can stand in for the Leggett et al. 1992 report on the IS92 scenarios? (I'm not allowed to include "grey literature"). No, this is not for the IPCC.

Arrhenius, Svante (1896) On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature of the ground, Philosophical Magazine Series 5 41 (April): 237-276.

Shafik, N. (1994) Economic development and environmental quality: an econometric analysis, Oxford Economic Papers 46: 757-773.

Holtz-Eakin, Douglas and Thomas M. Selden (1995) Stoking the fires? CO2 emissions and economic growth, Journal of Public Economics 57(1): 85-101.

Dietz, Thomas, and Eugene A. Rosa (1997) “Effects of population and affluence on CO2 emissions.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 94 (1) (January 7): 175 -179.

Schmalensee, R., Stoker, T. M., & Judson, R. A. (1998) World carbon dioxide emissions: 1950-2050. Review of Economics and Statistics 80: 15-27.

Grübler, Arnulf, Nebojsa Nakicénovic, and David G. Victor (1999) Dynamics of energy technologies and global change, Energy Policy 27: 247-280.

Ruddiman, William F. (2003) The anthropogenic greenhouse era began thousands of years ago, Climatic Change 61(3): 261-293.

Strazicich, Mark C. and John A. List (2003) Are CO2 emission levels converging among industrial countries? Environmental and Resource Economics 24(3): 263-271.

Aldy, Joseph E. (2006) Per capita carbon dioxide emissions: convergence or divergence? Environmental and Resource Economics 33(4): 533-555.

Riahi, Keywan, Arnulf Grübler, Nebojsa Nakicenovic (2007) Scenarios of long-term socio-economic and environmental development under climate stabilization, Technological Forecasting & Social Change 74: 887–935.

Raupach, Michael R., Gregg Marland, Philippe Ciais, Corinne Le Quéré, Josep G. Canadell, Gernot Klepper, Christopher B. Field (2007) Global and regional drivers of accelerating CO2 emissions, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(24): 10288-10923.

Garnaut, Ross, Stephen Howes, Frank Jotzo, and Peter Sheehan (2008) Emissions in the Platinum Age: the implications of rapid development for climate-change mitigation, Oxford Review of Economic Policy 24(2): 337-401.

Westerlund, Joakim and Syed A. Basher (2008) Testing for convergence in carbon dioxide emissions using a century of panel data, Environmental and Resource Economics 40:109–120.

Vollebergh, Herman R.J., Bertrand Melenberg, and Elbert Dijkgraaf (2009) Identifying reduced-form relations with panel data: The case of pollution and income, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 58(1): 27-42.

Henriques, Sofia Teives, and Astrid Kander (2010) “The modest environmental relief resulting from the transition to a service economy.” Ecological Economics 70 (2) (December 15): 271-282.

van Vuuren, Detlef P., Jae Edmonds, Mikiko Kainuma, Keywan Riahi, Allison Thomson, Kathy Hibbard, George C. Hurtt, Tom Kram, Volker Krey, Jean-Francois Lamarque, Toshihiko Masui, Malte Meinshausen, Nebojsa Nakicenovic, Steven J. Smith, and Steven K. Rose (2011) The representative concentration pathways: an overview, Climatic Change 109(1-2): 5-31.

In Defence of Elsevier

The hot topic at the moment in the scholarly publishing world is the growing movement to boycott Elsevier journals. This is a new angle on the open access debate. Elsevier is the biggest publisher of academic journals with over 2600 titles. Yes Elsevier make a lot of profit (About 1/3 of revenues) and they have engaged in dubious practices involving "fake medical journals" but that is no reason for a general boycott in my opinion. The current movement has been sparked by Elsevier's support for the US "Research Works Act". Whatever you think of that potential legislation, Elsevier are hardly the only supporter of it.

I am an associate editor of Ecological Economics which is published by Elsevier. The International Society for Ecological Economics has outsourced publication of their journal to the company. This certainly made sense in the days before electronic publication. Today, it might make a bit less sense given that it would be easier to replicate many of Elsevier's various functions, but it would still be a lot of extra work for the society. Elsevier make the journal available at a heavily discounted price to members of the society. More generally, Elsevier allow authors in all their journals to archive the final version of the paper (before they format it) on their institutional servers. So Elsevier helps us distribute our work and doesn't prevent free access to the results. Seems like a win-win to me, hardly a reason for a boycott. The Scopus citation database is another great service developed by Elsevier. Of course, they charge institutions huge amounts of money for this, but they also provide access for 30 days free of charge to referees for their journals.

Anyway, the whole argument that paying for subscription journals is paying for science twice (the other time is public funding of research grants and scientists' salaries) doesn't make sense. Elsevier is like Walmart. They distribute the product and this costs money. Walmart also makes a lot of money and has some monopoly power. Of course, there are a lot of people boycotting Walmart too, but something of a minority. I don't see why using public money to pay PLOS to publish a paper is morally better than using it for a university library to subscribe to a journal. One way or another the costs have to paid. Publishing in gold open access will allow greater access but favors more heavily funded authors getting published (PLOS does in fact waive publication fees if you can't pay but other publishers don't).

P.S.
For the sake of search engines: Defence seems to be the British spelling and defense the American.

The Inside Story on the 2010 ERA Economics Journals Rankings

Two Monash economists have written a working paper on bias in the selection of the economics journal ranks used in the ERA research assessment exercise in Australia. The selectors were all the full professors in economics in Australia identified by the Economic Society of Australia (ESA). They tended to vote for journals they had published in etc... In fact the rankings of economics journals (since abolished) were not that bad. There were a few glaring anomalies but these weren't the responsibility of the ESA. We are still using these rankings in practice. It's a meme that has stuck at least in economics.

Crawford School Working Papers in January 2012

Here are come highlights of the Crawford School's working papers series in January 2012. Across all six series we got 2198 abstract views and 754 downloads. The most downloaded papers in each series were:

Crawford School Research Papers:

David Stern - From Correlation to Granger Causality

Arndt-Corden Department of Economics, Departmental Working Papers:

Pierre van der Eng - Total Factor Productivity and Economic Growth in Indonesia

ASARC Working Papers:

Sunila George, Raghbendra Jha, and Hari K. Nagarajan - The Evolution and Structure of the Two-wheeler Industry in India

Asia Pacific Economics Papers:

Ryuta Ray Kato - THE REFORM OF THE PUBLIC HEALTH INSURANCE AND ECONOMIC GROWTH OF JAPAN

CCEP Working Papers:

Leo Dobes -
Adaptation to climate change: Formulating policy under uncertainty

Development Policy Centre Discussion Papers:

Stephen Howes - An overview of aid effectiveness, determinants and strategies

Congratulations to all the authors!

New papers in January include:

Determinants of Residential Water Consumption: Evidence and Analysis from a Ten-country Household Survey by Quentin Grafton, Michael Ward, Hang To, and Tom Kompas

Adaptation to climate change: Formulating policy under uncertainty by Leo Dobes

Roger Pielke Speaks at Crawford School

Roger Pielke spoke today at the Crawford School about his book The Climate Fix. He mainly focused on how the only real solution to the climate change problem is decarbonization of the energy supply. Energy efficiency will have less effect and population control or reducing GDP are non-starters and will have a relatively small effect. He spent a lot of time on how the required rates of decarbonization to reach climate change targets like reducing emissions by 80% by 2050 are much more rapid than any historical changes. This is true, but doesn't mean it is impossible as we haven't really tried to do it yet. The question is more about political feasibility. His answer is we need to make climate policy a positive about innovation and green jobs rather than a negative about cutting back and being dictated to by science which just ends up with backlash from the public and vested interests. He is in favor of a low carbon tax with the proceeds being earmarked for innovation. I don't really disagree with these conclusions but I think he plays up the unfeasibility thing too much. And he didn't really discuss the political aspects much or really focus on his policy options. In fact some audience members told me afterwards that they didn't think he talked about policy at all.

P.S.

Following an exchange on Roger's blog he pointed to an article he wrote that expands more on the proposed policy than he did in his talk.

Stiglitz on the Great Depression and the Great Recession

Joseph Stiglitz argues that the Great Depression (1930s in the US) and the Great Recession (now in the US) have a common cause in maladjustment to structural change in the economy. In the 1930s it was an overhang of the shift of employment from farming to manufacturing and today from manufacturing to the service sector. It's an interesting thesis. Odd that he omitted some important sectors - retail/wholesale, transport, & government admin from his list of service sectors. Or are many service employees becoming obsolete in advanced economies?

Scientific Collaboration Networks

This map is based on 5 years of data from Scopus and maps each joint authorship as a geographical connection. You can see a high resolution image here. This projection onto Google Earth is also pretty cool, though the resolution is no higher.

One thing I found a bit surprising was the prominent position of Brazil on the map. Another interesting thing is how integrated research is in some countries like Turkey where researchers appear to be spread evenly across the country:

Things Scientists Say

Australian Universities Ranked by Research Income

The chart shows all sources of direct research grants earned by Australian universities in 2010. This includes government, international, and industry funding. As yesterday's post explained there are also research block grants paid by the government that total about 50% of this direct funding. The graph clearly shows why we talk of the Group of Eight universities, which are the equivalent of the US R1 universities or the UK's Russell Group. ANU, Adelaide, and UWA are a lot smaller than the big 5. So if we adjusted for size, income within this group would probably be more equal.

But there is a steep fall off to University of Newcastle. That Newcastle is the highest ranked outside the Go8 is no surprise.

How Does the Australian Government Use the ERA Results?

Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) is the Australian research assessment exercise that is very similar to the British REF. We are currently working on our submission to the 2012 ERA assessment, which is the second assessment following ERA 2010. There has been a lot of discussion of the assessment methods and results but few people seem to know about how these results are being used.

So far the ERA results will be used as part of the method of allocating money in the SRE scheme. Currently SRE is around $150 million of the $1.6 billion of research block grants paid to Australian universities. This number will rise to more than $300 million over the next year. The program is supposed to provide universities with overhead or indirect costs of funded research. Unlike in the US, the Australian Research Council (ARC) and NHMRC doesn't pay universities any overhead payments on grants. These come later through these block grant schemes.

The government released a consultation paper on the method to be used in 2012. Basically, money would be allocated according to the amount of competitive research grants each university earned weighted by some ERA based indicator. They haven't yet released the exact algorithm that will be used.

So by next year about 20% of research block grants will be weighted by ERA derived measures. I expect though that ERA will be used to allocate more of the money in the future.

The Most Rejected Paper?

Is this the most rejected paper in the history of economics?

Powdthavee, N. I Can't Smile Without You: Spousal Correlation in Life Satisfaction", Journal of Economic Psychology, 30(4), 675-689.

Rejected 15 times. I think 4 is pretty much my record. 4 journals, though, not counting revise and resubmits.

Abstract Deadline for Perth IAEE Conference Extended

The submission deadline for the IAEE conference in Perth has been extended till after the IAEE meeting in Kyoto. So if you missed the deadline you now still have a chance to send in an abstract. Together with my collaborators, I've submitted a total of three abstracts. Two are on meta-analysis and the other is based on my foundation seminar at ANU.

The conference organizers report:

"We have had a solid abstract submission response by the initial deadline, and we are processing those submissions straight away. However, the program committee has decided that we will be open to additional submissions until the end of the Kyoto conference. This will not delay our decision and notification process for those received by the deadline, it just allows the opportunity for those who may been caught out by the Holiday Season. We look forward to seeing you all in Perth in June!

If you have not yet downloaded the Abstract Template, please visit our website to download it."

Recent Books on Energy

A former student asked me for suggestions for less academic books that address current energy issues. Here is what I suggested.

First, Vaclav Smil has written a huge number of books on energy. He is maybe a bit pessimistic. I read the global catastrophes book (2008) but he has put out more books since then that look interesting. In particular, this one on energy transitions.

By contrast, Amory Lovins is a huge optimist. We brought him to speak in Australia back in 2000. This looks to be his latest book.

Several recent books are listed in this review in the Chronicle of Higher Education. When I was in the US in October, our taxi driver in Ann Arbor was reading Rifkin's book. We discussed it after he asked me what I do...

How to Write Economics Papers

Back in 2010 I blogged on John Cochrane's writing tips. Here are the slides from Daniel Hamermesh's presentation on how to publish in a good journal. A lot of it is about how to write papers rather than specifically about getting into good journals. His advice is a bit more traditional than Cochrane's, I think. You can see the full presentation on YouTube.

Crawford School Blogs

I've just linked a Crawford School blog from the Development Policy Centre to my bloglist. Also from the Crawford School, though they don't describe it as a blog, is the East Asia Forum.

P.S.
As Paul noted in the comments, there is also the Global Water Forum, which is an initiative of of the UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance at the Crawford School. There are probably more that I don't know about yet. These kinds of blogs and forums are something I am enthusiastic about us using more to complement formal publications and events as well as traditional mentions in the media.

ResearchGate Revisited

Back in 2010 I blogged briefly about ResearchGate. Today, I saw this article in the New York Times heavily featuring the site. I wonder if they sent a press release to the NYT that triggered this article? Anyway, I decided I should set up a profile on ResearchGate. I only managed to find two of my papers via their search engine - both from 2011. I wasn't impressed. I have a unique academic name (No other academic has both these initials together with my surname: D. I. Stern) so it shouldn't be too hard. I found two economists at ANU on the site already. Searches for "environmental economics" and "energy economics" didn't bring up anyone else I knew. So I'm not impressed and won't visit this site very often.

In a follow up to the NYT article, Krugman discusses how things work in economics and how it's changed. Back in 1993 when I was a post-doc at York part of my job was setting up working papers exchanges with other institutions. We'd mail them our papers if they'd mail us theirs. Soon after that, WoPEc, the predecessor of RePEc, got started and I've been involved with that ever since.

Energy Policy and Climate Mitigation in China: The Ideas Motivating Change

Based on reading of government documents and the writings of Chinese academics, Olivia Boyd's ANU masters thesis documents the role of three ideas in driving China's current energy and climate policies:

1. The idea of new energy security that stresses domestic, rather than international, sources of energy insecurity.
2. Green development and growing concern over the environmental and resource constraints on economic growth.
3. Low-carbon leadership, which posits a vision of China’s international political and economic influence based on climate leadership and low-carbon markets.

This is roughly what I have argued are China's motivations - for example in my CRWF 8000 lectures on energy and the environment that I gave in October - but I find a lot of resistance to accepting that China is serious about these issues and I based my view largely on conjecture rather than a close reading of the literature. This thesis stands on much more solid foundations.

I saw this paper on academia.edu, which I am finding more and more useful as people are posting interesting papers on it that I otherwise wouldn't see.

Be Known by the Company You Keep: Citations - Quality or Chance?

I previously blogged about how highly downloaded working papers lead to higher downloads of other papers in the same series. So I was interested to read that having your paper appear in the same issue of a journal as a highly cited article increases your number of citations. The implication is that weak papers can benefit from being in journals with high impact factors. Another interesting point in this paper is that self-citations help increase citations to a paper. I've suspected that this is true. Advertising your paper by citing it gets more people to be aware of it. But we can't really establish causality here. Maybe better authors just tend to cite themselves more and/or get more opportunities to do so.

Interview with Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics

The QJE is currently widely regarded as the top economics journal. It is also well-known for leading the trend towards "desk-rejections", where papers are rejected by the editors without sending them to external referees. This greatly speeds up the process for papers that are obviously not likely to pass the refereeing process. One of my roles at Ecological Economics as associate editor is giving advice about whether to desk reject papers and I think we are desk rejecting more over time.

I found this interview with the editor of the QJE that I thought had some useful tips about submitting papers to top journals. At Ecological Economics, sloppiness won't be an automatic desk reject if the paper looks interesting. We are more likely to throw out papers because the basic thesis makes no sense or the authors do not justify at all what they do. But really bad English that hinders understanding will result in a desk reject too. Unless your English is close to native speaker standard it is worth getting a native English speaker to look over your paper before submission whether for free or for a fee.