It noted:
"A backlash is building against inflation—the kind showing up in economics journals.
The average length of a published economics paper has more than tripled over the past four decades, and some academics are sick of wading through them. At this year’s American Economics Association conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor David Autor compared a 94-page working paper about the minimum wage to “being bludgeoned to death with a Nerf bat” and started a Twitter hashtag, #ThePaperIsTooDamnedLong. ."What makes these econ papers excessively long? According to the piece the reasons include: "similar points made with several different data sets, different data sets, lengthy reviews of past research, multiple indices with technical details and page after page of Greek letter-laden formulas that require well....a Ph.D. to understand."
That's jaw-dropping in itself because - apart from a specific and defined "review" paper - you'd not see such nonsense in an astrophysics or modern physics journal. Why are these absurdly lengthy papers bad? According to Katharine Anderson, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University, quoted in the WSJ article:
"It's bad for everybody. It's bad for the authors because it takes years to put together a paper that anybody would consider publishing. It's bad for referees because you have to read a 40 to 60 page paper that might be total crap."
Hmmm....well, I'd say if it "makes similar points with different data sets" and incorporates "different data sets" as well as different indices to cover all the relevant technical points, it's already total crap. If each published physics paper gets 7 reads on average, I'd guess each such econ paper gets maybe .... 1/2 ...if that.
And indeed Prof. Anderson more or less confirms my take i.e. that it "takes a real commitment" to read one such paper. But with so many time constraints in academia today, what assistant prof would even have the time to wade through half of a turgid, redundant, 60-page econ paper? That tests the bounds of credulity.
But perhaps a solution to the economists' problem of overlong papers can be solved using A.I. writers, such as the "Beta Writer" - capable of writing full and coherent scientific papers. The discussion of these robot writers first appeared in an editorial in the June, 2019 issue of Physics Today, entitled 'Here Come The Robot Authors', by Charles Day.
Prof. Day points out that in the case of Beta Writer, it demonstrated a definite ability "to distill and arrange the main findings" (in this case for lithium -ion or Li batteries) and that at the very least it "should prove lucrative for Springer Nature."
I'd warrant such an ability to distill definitely makes Beta Writer an indispensable instrument to pare down those lengthy econ papers. How can such an A.I tool work in the realm of published papers? Prof. Day again (ibid.):
"The formulaic style of modern scientific papers makes the work of Beta Writer and Manuscript Writer possible. The style is efficient because it's predictable."
This suggests that if economics papers employed a similar template, even if no A.I. writers were used, they could at least be rendered into readable efforts that don't bore a journal referee or other academic into a narcoleptic stupor....before getting through even 5 pages.
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