On Secondhandism and Scientific Appraisal

There is a quiet but nonetheless significant and persistent disagreement among members of the scholarly community of economists regarding appraisal of scientific merit. On one side are those who believe, implicitly or explicitly, that there is a competitive market for scientific ideas in economics in which major contributions (and the individuals who make them) are identified relatively efficiently. In contrast to what we might refer to as the free-market side of the discipline are those who believe that the prevailing process of scientific appraisal is quite inefficient and therefore unreliable. That is, the process is characterized by market failure. The ongoing skirmishes between these two camps involve two quite distinct aspects of scholarship: (1) the imperative, as it were, for an individual to publish in mainstream economics journals to be taken seriously by the profession as a whole, and (2) the use of citations as a measure of the impact of a contribution to the scholarly literature of economics. We address these issues in turn.