We need a centralized market for matching co-authors. I want to be able to go there with an idea and find a co-author who has some expertise in the area. I guess there are some obvious difficulties. For one thing, the researcher with the idea would worry that his idea would get stolen if he went shopping it around publicly. Also, potential co-authors would have little incentive to invest in an idea brought to the market by someone else as it would be public knowledge who was the creative partner and who was the “research assistant.”
I suppose the second-best solution is a blog.
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April 6, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Sean
Two-sided matching between junior and senior faculty, where posted information is only available to the other type, should take care of both problems.
April 6, 2009 at 11:16 pm
Richard H. Serlin
I think a Match.com for Co-authors is potentially an extremely valuable idea. The problems could probably often be dealt with relatively well. The benefits could be enormous academia-wide.
With regard to being known not as the author who came up with the main idea, at least when trying to get tenure in a school outside the top 50, it’s still very valuable to have your name on another respected journal article even if it’s known to those on the tenure committee, and some others, that the other author came up with the main idea.
April 6, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Richard H. Serlin
Besides I would hope that more than a few professors would want to co-author on good ideas even if they don’t get main credit for them, just to do good by getting these ideas fully developed and utilized. It can take a great deal of technical knowledge and skill, time and work, to get some great ideas into a complete model and/or emperical results that are published.
April 7, 2009 at 2:59 am
AlanE
I am trying to use Web 2.0 to acheive something along these lines, I have created a platform under the name fullmonte to bring people together to start online research projects and blogging. The blogosphere provides a unique way to get original ideas out there away from institutions which are not as flexible.
April 7, 2009 at 11:23 am
Anush
This seems like a great idea, but it assumes that the most important thing in a co-author relationship is interest in the same idea. I haven’t ever co-authored an academic paper, but it seems to me that diligence, writing approach, and general affability might be more important — and those things are best measured in person.
April 7, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Richard H. Serlin
Seriously, this could address a very large problem. A lot of good ideas, which could do great good, sit underutilized for years, or often decades or more, because the person who thought of them does not have the manpower and/or implementation expertise, and/or, and this is just the reality, the Ivy league pedigree to get the idea read, resourced, and published.
This could potentially really increase production and value creation in academia. Moreover, especially if we could get departments (and journal gatekeepers) to care more about providing maximum utility to society, some people could be rewarded as excellent implementers. Their strength would be more in helping those who come up with good general ideas to implement them and turn them into concrete models and/or empirics and publications. As, I’ve seen in entrepreneuring, some people are great at coming up with ideas, but not very good at implementing and developing them. Others are not very good at coming up with ideas, but are great implementers, which is very often more important.
Of course, getting academic department leaders and journal gatekeepers to really value what’s good for society, rather than their career, or what they most enjoy working on, brings up an idea I have mulled.
What’s valued, published, and worked on, at least in economics and finance academia is far out of line with what has the greatest NPV (overall benefits or risk-adjusted return) for society, because the asymmetric information is enormous. The taxpayers can’t come close to understanding academic papers with all the math and jargon, and so can’t differentiate between those that are highly beneficial and those with very little benefit (or social NPV to be precise).
What if we had a government board of experts (with training and culture for loyalty to the public, not their academic field) to study academic departments and journals with regard to their spending dollars and rewarding professors relative to social contribution. These boards would then award government support — all support, including for the university in general — only in proportion to the departments social NPV. No huge amounts of dollars to projects or journals of little social value because that’s the area of expertise and publishing of those in control.
Anyone want to co-author on this idea?
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