Cost/benefit per article/citation

Gangan Prathap gp at CMMACS.ERNET.IN
Mon Apr 18 23:16:28 EDT 2005


In India, we worked this out to be approx $200,000 a paper (approx. Rs.
1 crore = Rs. 10 million).

Gangan Prathap

Stevan Harnad wrote:

>Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
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>
>On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, Mike Kurtz wrote:
>
>
>
>>I am away so I cannot work this out, but the cost per refereed paper in
>>astronomy is between 0.5 and 1 Million $US.  This just takes the number
>>of refereed pubs and divides into the 6-7 G$ cost of the field per year.
>>It is $1M if you only take the main joutrnals.
>>
>>If each article references 20 papers (a good guess, I can do beter
>>when home) then > the value of each cite is @5-50 thousand $  NOT $500.
>>
>>
>
>Dear Mike,
>
>Thanks so much. That's a very interesting and useful calculation, but
>not quite what I meant! You are there giving the *cost* per article (or
>citation), whereas I was asking about the *value* (benefit, return) per
>article and citation (for those whose salaries and/or research funding
>covary with article and citation counts).
>
>Hal Varian (many thanks Hal!) construed my query in the direction I had
>intended, and replied with the 4 references below. A 20 year old study
>across fields by Diamond found the marginal value of a citation to vary
>from $50 to $1300, depending on the discipline and its annual number of
>annual articles per author, and depending also on whether it is for the
>1st citation (above 0) or the Nth.
>http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v11p354y1988.pdf
>
>It would be wonderful to have a more recent estimate of the marginal
>dollar value per citation (to the author and/or the author's institution),
>across disciplines, now that we are in the online age! (That would help
>me translate the OA citation advantage into the only language that
>everyone seems to understand: dollars!)
>http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
>
>Chrs, S
>PS (Even for the cost per article (or citation), I would rather divide the
>number of articles published annually by astro journals into the total
>annual revenue of astor journals. There I think the average cost is
>about $2000 per article (of which only about 25% is for implementing
>peer review, which I think is the only essential cost: the rest could be
>scrapped, the journal doing and certifying the outcome of the peer
>review, and all archiving and access-provision offloaded onto that
>author's institution (and funder).)
>
>Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2005 16:19:09 UT
>From: hal at sims.berkeley.edu
>To: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk
>Subject: value of a citation
>
>There's a reasonable amount of work in this area.  Here are a few JSTOR
>references.
>
>http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html
>
>Title:               Economists' Salaries and Lifetime Productivity
>Author(s):           Lawrence W. Kenny; Roger E. Studley
>Source:              Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 62, No. 2. (Oct., 1995),
>                     pp. 382-393.
>Stable URL:          http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0038-4038%28199510%2962%3A2%3C382%3AESALP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q
>
>Title:               What is a Citation Worth?
>http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v11p354y1988.pdf
>Author(s):           Arthur M. Diamond Jr.
>Source:              The Journal of Human Resources, Vol. 21, No. 2. (Spring,
>                     1986), pp. 200-215.
>Abstract:            A robust finding in all studies is that citations are a
>                     positive and significant determinant of earnings over
>                     almost all of the observed range of citation levels. The
>                     marginal value of a citation (when the level of citations
>                     is zero) varies between $50 and $1,300. Some
>                     differences in marginal values may be due to differences
>                     in citation practices among disciplines while others may
>                     be due to differences among the studies in the control
>                     variables included in the salary regressions. Finally, no
>                     gain in explanatory power results from the inclusion in
>                     the salary regression of the costly nonfirst-author
>                     citation measure.
>
>Title:               Estimates of the Returns to Quality and Coauthorship in
>                     Economic Academia
>Author(s):           Raymond D. Sauer
>Source:              The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 96, No. 4. (Aug.,
>                     1988), pp. 855-866.
>Stable URL:          http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-3808%28198808%2996%3A4%3C855%3AEOTRTQ%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P
>Abstract:            Salaries of academic economists are studied to determine
>                     if individuals receive differential returns to publishing
>                     articles of varying quality and to coauthored versus
>                     single-authored articles. Estimates based on detailed data
>                     and a flexible nonlinear least-squares procedure indicate
>                     that substantial returns to quality exist and that an
>                     individual's return from a coauthored paper with n authors
>                     is approximately 1/n times that of a single-authored
>                     paper.
>
>Title:               Scholarship, Citations and Salaries: Economic Rewards in
>                     Economics
>Author(s):           Daniel S. Hamermesh; George E. Johnson; Burton A.
>                     Weisbrod
>Source:              Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 49, No. 2. (Oct., 1982),
>                     pp. 472-481.
>Stable URL:          http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0038-4038%28198210%2949%3A2%3C472%3ASCASER%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y
>
>
>

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