The Top Political Science Paper on SSRN
This New York Times story about SSRN rankings lead me to search for the top-ranked paper by political scientists. Can you guess what it is?
Here it is. If that link is gated for you, go here. Maybe you’ve heard of it.
Its ranking, by the way, is #139, beneath such eye-grabbers as “Understanding Risk and Return, the CAPM, and the Fama-French Three-Factor Model “ (#124) and “Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Risk Transfer” (#68).
This illuminates the bigger problem: political scientists don’t seem to post papers to the SSRN at nearly the rate of economists and lawyers. See the SSRN political science network for an illustration.
Comments
Compare Humanities where the top paper is beating #2 by close to an order of magnitude. The reason? Its title is ‘fuck’.
Posted by: Dan | June 11, 2008 04:25 AM
I’d guess that it’s because of a continued skepticism for things like the SSRN, blogs, and such in our discipline. By comportment and temperament, poli sci tends to the conservative (not in our politics, necessarily, but how we do things). After a few years around this shop, PS impresses me as more of an “ultra-late adopter” than an early adopter.
And the disciplinary incentives don’t seem to be there. Economists seem to have more outlets for working papers (NBER, etc.) than we do, and they get more “credit” than we do for such things.
Posted by: Nate | June 16, 2008 10:33 AM
I’m the sort of person who is (or would be) open to such services - being a one-time web developer myself. However, I find SSRN rather clunky to navigate around. Justifiably or not, I also have it mentally tagged as “proprietary”, which makes me reticent to use it. Obviously, I can’t speak for others, though.
Something like SSRN for polisci sounds great. I’ve often pondered some kind of database driven site that allows papers to be posted with a protocol as simple as blog trackback pings. Pie in the sky at the moment…
Posted by: Tim | June 18, 2008 12:19 AM