Obviously, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. As it turns out, I’m up for tenure review in two years, and with the publication lag being what it is (especially considering my historical rejection probabilities), I’ve been focusing on getting my working papers published. The good news is that it worked – three papers got accepted this year, and two more are under review. I finally get to work on analyzing new-ish data and putting together first drafts, which is my favorite part of the process.

I’ve also been working on Academic Sequitur(slowly but surely). We’re all set up to track new articles in 88 journals and working paper series, which is very exciting. (The website is still being built, but if you want to be notified when it’s ready for prime-time, sign up here). In the meantime, I’ve decided to post some fun facts about our current database. Keep in mind that this database isn’t representative of all research in economics/finance because we have more years of information for some journals. But for blogging purposes, it’s close enough!

First fun fact: the average econ/finance paper has 2.08 authors. About 29 percent of the papers have one author, 42 percent have two, 22 percent have three, and 5 percent have four. That covers 98.7 percent of papers. Then we get into crazy territory with papers that have 5, 10, or even 17 authors! And the record for the largest number of authors goes to…“Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Inventors (But Never Asked): Evidence from the PatVal-EU Survey” (a CEPR Discussion Paper from 2006). Let’s see if another paper comes along in the future to break that record.

Now let’s talk about the content of the articles themselves. If we don’t count word variations as unique words (“rate” and “rated”, “tax” and “taxes”, etc.), only count words that are used 3 times or more (even the internet has spelling errors!), and ignore very common English words like “the”, “I”, and “we”, the abstracts contain over 15,000 unique words. Out of these, what do you think is the most common word that economists use in their abstracts? It is…drum roll…“model”. How stereotypical, right? That is followed by (in order): “effect”, “paper”, “market”, “result”, “increase”, “country”, “policy”, “firm”, and “data”. Interestingly, “increase” is used almost 6 times more than “decrease” (which ranks 195thon the list). So maybe economics are not so dismal after all? Unless all these articles are about tax increases.

At this point, it would be pretty straightforward for us to release a product that lets you pick which journals, authors, and/or user-specified keywords you want to be notified about. But we’re going further and developing an algorithm that classifies articles into both broad subject areas (e.g., “Development economics”) and narrower topics (e.g., “credit constraints”). Text analysis is a difficult problem, especially when you’re dealing with text that’s not written in everyday English language (because there are fewer existing tools available to process the words). But we have a plan, and we’re confident that it will succeed! Shameless self-promotion over. Stay tuned.