Dissemination, Publication, and Impact of Finance Research: When Novelty Meets Conventionality
Rui Dai, Lawrence Donohue, Qingyi (Freda) Drechsler, Wei Jiang
Review of Finance, Volume 27, Issue 1, February 2023, Pages 79–141, https://doi.org/10.1093/rof/rfac018
Using numeric and textual data extracted from over 50,000 finance articles in SSRN’s Financial and Economics Network (FEN) during 2001–2019, our study is the first large-scale empirical research that uncovers the determinants of research outcomes, such as publication outlet, impact and readership in academic finance. We aim to reconcile—confirming, contrasting, and uncovering nuances—the empirical data with the anecdotal evidence and common wisdom regarding how research is evaluated and recognized by the community and its premier outlets, i.e., acceptance at top journals, such as Journal of Finance, and conferences, such as American Finance Association (AFA) annual meeting.
Leveraging on current-state of art machine learning techniques (Universal Sentence Encoder) and applying on a large body of both published work and working papers, we show that conventionality, measured as semantic similarity with existent research, helps boost readership and publication prospects. This is probably because both readers and journals welcome papers that have a large footprint on the existing knowledge, possibly because audience and reviewers are better able to connect and resonate with such research.
On the other hand, novelty, measured in the forms of emerging topics and novel databases, is associated with better publishing outcomes, after controlling for various authors and institutions characteristics. We also show that studies that do not easily map into established finance subfields or that introduce non-finance elements face a higher hurdle in the publication process, partially due to the fact that referees and editors are risk averse and under time/resource constraint, and are thus reluctant to endorse research whose quality is difficult to assess. Thus, there seems to be a contrast in our profession’s attitude toward papers whose research questions span multiple fields versus papers that build on prior knowledge from multiple fields. Readers and journals in finance value authors’ effort and ability in bridging knowledge from different research elements but are nevertheless skeptical of research that tackles questions without a well-defined habitat.
Finally, we confirm that admissions into top conferences such as AFA and WFA are significant precursors to publication and impact. Being on the program of either conference predicts a 48.1% increase in the probability of publishing in the top three finance journals relative to propensity-matched control papers, and an 87.3% increase in citation.
The main findings of our study probably confirm the common understanding that while exploratory projects have the potential for high recognition, researchers need to first overcome the hurdles of the publication process, especially the completeness and robustness requirements expected at top outlets and the uncertainty in receiving proper valuations from referees from the more conventional domains. We hope the analysis presented in this research can provide comprehensive and objective evidence that could help the profession, especially its leaders, to reflect on the prevailing patterns and to think of creative ways to encourage and promote innovations in research.