Journal as a Self-Reinforcing Mechanism

• Autor(a) principal: Cabral, Luís M. B.
• Data de Publicação: 1992
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/85867

We look at the journal publishing activity from an industrial organization perspective. We show that if product differentiation is not too large and refereeing not too noisy, then journal reputation is a path-dependent process, that is, the reputation of a journal converges to some value which depends on the (random) pattern of submissions during the journals' first periods of life. Empirical evidence of path-dependence for Economics periodicals is provided. Next, we explore the implications of these results in a model of sequential choice of scope of a new journal. The path-dependent nature of journal reputation leads to a bias towards specialization, which in turn implies that the increase in the number of publications is greater than the increase in the number of "good" papers written.